Understanding the effects of a teacher video on learning from a multimedia document: an eye-tracking study

The present study investigated the effects on students’ learning experience of adding a video of a teacher to an e-learning module. A total of 43 undergraduates were asked to learn the content of a pedagogical document either with or without a teacher video on the screen. Although video captures of teachers are increasingly being integrated into online courses, few studies have investigated their impact and the best way of optimizing them. According to the social-cue hypothesis, the presence of a teacher (face and gestures) positively influences learners’ motivation and engagement in their learning. By contrast, the interference hypothesis holds that the teacher’s presence can lead to poor performances, as it acts as a source of visual interference that diverts students’ attention away from the relevant information. By assessing subjective ratings and learning outcomes, the present study tended to support the social-cue hypothesis, as it showed that adding a teacher video on screen significantly improved students’ retention of the spoken explanations, without disturbing either their performances on diagram and transfer problems or the time needed to process the document. Eye-tracking data showed that students spent 25% of their time watching the teacher video. Adding this video had no significant observable effects on the subjective ratings (i.e., social presence, evaluation of the teacher’s motivational skills, situational interest, cognitive load). These results suggest that videos of teachers can be used to improve social cues in multimedia learning without creating interference effects.     

Improving students’ learning by providing a graphic organizer after a multimedia document

The present study was intended to deepen current knowledge about the impact of graphic organizers (GOs) on students’ learning in a computer-based learning environment, by evaluating the effects of successive versus simultaneous presentation of a GO and an explanatory text. Based on the previous studies, we hypothesized that simultaneous display of a GO improves learning performances for the information it highlights (represented elements), but impairs those for nonrepresented elements, owing to a focused processing effect during text reading. We predicted that staggering the display of the document and the GO would avoid this effect and enhance the learning of both represented and nonrepresented elements. We compared three groups: students who studied a multimedia document without a GO (control group); students who viewed the same multimedia document accompanied by a GO that was displayed simultaneously (simultaneous GO group); and students who viewed the document and were then shown the GO (successive GO group). In line with previous research on GOs, results showed that adding a GO to the multimedia document increased students’ memorization of the represented elements and their comprehension. Interestingly, students in the successive GO group exhibited enhanced memorization of the nonrepresented elements and had the highest comprehension scores. These original results indicate that delaying the display of the GO can lead students to process the overall information more deeply and, in turn, improve their learning.     

Asking students to be active learners: the effects of totally or partially self-generating a graphic organizer on students’ learning performances

Instructional Science - We compared performances on a learning task in which students (N?=?81) viewed a pedagogical multimedia document without (control group) or with a readymade...     

The effects of graphic organizer completeness and note-taking medium on computer-based learning

Education and Information Technologies - The purpose of this study was to determine how graphic organizer completeness (complete, partial, or no organizer) and note-taking medium (longhand or...