Intro and Connections with Course Content: (3)
When deciding on what to research for this week’s blog assignment, I thought about the multimedia design principles that intrigued me most this semester. These included Mayer's design principles. During week seven, I realized that while I thought I knew how to effectively select and design presentations like PowerPoints and Prezis, I was actually violating the multimedia and modality principles! In one of my MMP updates, I even commented on one of my “failed” Prezis. Then in another update, I shared a glimpse of my newly Mayer-improved PowerPoint. However, this week, I wanted to make sure that I definitely understood his principles and applied them correctly. Therefore, I researched Mayer and found a study by Tabbers, Martens, and van Merrienboer, entitled Multimedia instructions and cognitive load theory: Effects of modality and cueing.
Summary of Main Points: (1)
This study explores the generalizability of Mayer’s modality and signaling (cueing) principles. It points out that previous studies, which replicated the modality and cueing effect, have some features that make its generalizability questionable.
For instance:
Therefore, this study included instructions that:
The participants:
-visual text and no cues in the diagram
-audio text and cues in the diagram
-and audio text and no cues in the diagram.
Overall, the study reported that students performed better on the tests when they had viewed the instructions with visual text. This contradicts Mayer’s (and other referenced studies’) results. Here are a few reasons why:
Reflection on Relevance to our Course (2):
This study was really interesting and definitely relevant to our course. I originally chose to read this to learn more about Mayer’s principles and found it by searching for scholarly articles on Mayer’s design principles in general. After reading the abstract, I thought that it might be interesting to see if the study could replicate Mayer’s ideas on modality and cueing more specifically. Overall, by reading this article, I learned to question the conditions that make the principles valid.
Article (4):
If you would like to read the article explained above, you can access it via Rutgers Library:
http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=13276049&site=ehost-live&scope=site&lang=en
When deciding on what to research for this week’s blog assignment, I thought about the multimedia design principles that intrigued me most this semester. These included Mayer's design principles. During week seven, I realized that while I thought I knew how to effectively select and design presentations like PowerPoints and Prezis, I was actually violating the multimedia and modality principles! In one of my MMP updates, I even commented on one of my “failed” Prezis. Then in another update, I shared a glimpse of my newly Mayer-improved PowerPoint. However, this week, I wanted to make sure that I definitely understood his principles and applied them correctly. Therefore, I researched Mayer and found a study by Tabbers, Martens, and van Merrienboer, entitled Multimedia instructions and cognitive load theory: Effects of modality and cueing.
Summary of Main Points: (1)
This study explores the generalizability of Mayer’s modality and signaling (cueing) principles. It points out that previous studies, which replicated the modality and cueing effect, have some features that make its generalizability questionable.
For instance:
- They mainly taught a technical subject.
- The instructional time (duration of multimedia/presentation) was brief.
- They were mainly system-paced.
- The studies took place in a laboratory setting.
Therefore, this study included instructions that:
- Taught a non-technical subject (instructional design).
- Lasted for more than an hour.
- Were learner-paced.
- Were tested in a traditional classroom setting.
The participants:
- First watched four different versions of the instructions. Those with:
-visual text and no cues in the diagram
-audio text and cues in the diagram
-and audio text and no cues in the diagram.
- Then took retention tests and transference tests.
- Finally completed self-assessments, which discussed their levels of effort during each part of the process.
Overall, the study reported that students performed better on the tests when they had viewed the instructions with visual text. This contradicts Mayer’s (and other referenced studies’) results. Here are a few reasons why:
- The study pointed out that perhaps, Mayer’s principles are not generalizable if the instructions are longer. Listening might be more boring and tiresome if the audio spans the course of an hour as it did it this study. Attention span and focus might be factors when the text is longer. Therefore, the modality effect may only exist if the segment is short.
- Also, the researchers posit that the conditions in the environment can have an influence on effectiveness. For instance, the audio took a long time to download because the Internet was slow, and so students might have been discouraged by the wait time. This is more common of a regular classroom rather than a lab-controlled study, and therefore the bimodal effects observed in studies like Mayer’s are not generalizable.
- Finally, how the instructions are paced could influence how effective the visual text is versus the audio text. When instructions are learner-paced, students can integrate visual text with images better because they have more time to go back and forth between the two and actually absorb content. This factor takes away from the dual-modality effect observed in previous studies.
Reflection on Relevance to our Course (2):
This study was really interesting and definitely relevant to our course. I originally chose to read this to learn more about Mayer’s principles and found it by searching for scholarly articles on Mayer’s design principles in general. After reading the abstract, I thought that it might be interesting to see if the study could replicate Mayer’s ideas on modality and cueing more specifically. Overall, by reading this article, I learned to question the conditions that make the principles valid.
Article (4):
If you would like to read the article explained above, you can access it via Rutgers Library:
http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=13276049&site=ehost-live&scope=site&lang=en
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