A relatively new technology being used to deliver academic lessons is immersive virtual reality (IVR). This study examined whether IVR is a more effective instructional medium than other multimedia, such as a video on a computer monitor. Additionally, this study explored the underlying affective and cognitive mechanisms of learning in an immersive…

This study examines an aspect of the role of emotion in multimedia learning, i.e., whether participants can recognize the instructor's positive or negative emotion based on hearing short clips involving only the instructor's voice just as well as also seeing an embodied onscreen agent. Participants viewed 16 short video clips from a statistics…

This study examined the impacts of adding emotional design features to a multimedia lesson (color alone, anthropomorphism alone, or color & anthropomorphism together) on college students' affective processes (measured by ratings of experienced emotion during learning), cognitive processes (measured by eye-tracking metrics), and learning…

Background: How to improve learning with online multimedia lessons has attracted widespread concern. Prior studies have attempted to help students learn by breaking a video lesson into several segments. However, there has been a debate about whether learners can use pause time effectively and whether prompting them to engage in different types of…

As immersive virtual reality (IVR) systems proliferate in classrooms, it is important to understand how they affect learning outcomes and the underlying affective and cognitive processes that may cause these outcomes. Proponents argue that IVR could improve learning by increasing positive affective and cognitive processing, thereby supporting…

Background: Learning-by-teaching is a generative learning strategy in which students are told they will have to teach what they are learning to others. Although learning-by-teaching has been shown to be effective in some cases, few studies have established guidelines for how to optimize the benefits of learning-by-teaching as a generative learning…

Generative learning theory posits that learners engage more deeply and produce better learning outcomes when they engage in selecting, organizing, and integrating processes during learning. The present experiments examine whether the generative learning activity of generating explanations can be extended to online multimedia lessons and whether…

How does the emotional tone (happy or sad) and gender (male or female) of the instructor's computer-generated voice in a multimedia lesson affect learning processes and outcomes for female learners (Experiment 1) and male learners (Experiment 2)? In two experiments, college students viewed a 2.5 min narrated slideshow on the formation of lightning…

Background: With the rapid popularization of e-learning, how to improve online learning has aroused widespread concern. A human-like pedagogical agent (PA) that displays eye gaze and gestures, is often added to online multimedia lessons to increase social connection and improve learning in e-learning environments. However, there has been a debate…

This study explores the role of the instructor's face and eye gaze as social and attentional cues in promoting learning from a video lecture on kidney physiology. In a 2 × 2 between-subjects design, 133 college students were randomly assigned to a gaze behavior condition and a video whiteboard type condition. The instructor either shifted her gaze…

We investigated the instructional effectiveness of using an interactive and immersive virtual reality (IVR) simulation versus a video for teaching scientific knowledge in 2 between-subjects experiments. In Experiment 1, 131 high school students (84 females) used a science simulation that involved forensic analysis of a collected DNA sample in a…

This classroom experiment investigates the effects of adding representational pictures to multiple-choice and constructed-response test items to understand the role of the response format for the multimedia effect in testing. Participants were 575 fifth- and sixth-graders who answered 28 science test items--seven items in each of four experimental…