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…

This paper presents a personal account of developments in research on online learning over the past 30 years. Research on how to design online instruction represents an example of applying the science of learning to education. It contributes to the science of learning (as exemplified by developments in cognitive load theory, the cognitive theory…

This study investigated the most effective way to present an instructional video that contains words in the students' second language. Korean-speaking university students received a 16-min video lesson on Antarctica that included English narration (video + narration group), English text subtitles (video + text group), or English narration with…

The goal of the present study is to determine how to incorporate social cues such as gesturing in animated pedagogical agents (PAs) for online multimedia lessons in ways that promote student learning. In 3 experiments, college students learned about synaptic transmission from a multimedia narrated presentation while their eye movements were…

In 4 experiments, participants viewed a short video-based lesson about how the Doppler effect works. Some students viewed already-drawn diagrams while listening to a concurrent oral explanation, whereas other students listened to the same explanation while viewing the instructor actually draw the diagrams by hand. All students then completed…

In three studies, eye movements of participants were recorded while they viewed a single-slide multimedia presentation about how car brakes work. Some of the participants saw an integrated presentation in which each segment of words was presented near its corresponding area of the diagram (integrated group, Experiments 1 and 3) or an integrated…

Presents research on and discusses the redundancy effect, consistent with a dual-channel theory of multimedia learning in which adding on-screen text can overload the visual information-processing channel, causing learners to split their visual attention between two sources. In research, lower transfer performance also occurred when interesting…

In two experiments, students received two presentations of a narrated animation explaining how lightning forms, followed by retention and transfer tests. The goal was to determine possible benefits of incorporating a modest amount of computer-user interactivity within a multimedia explanation. Results were consistent with cognitive load theory and…

College students (Experiment 1) and non-college adults (Experiment 2) studied a computer-based 31-frame lesson on electronics that offered help-screens containing text (text group) or illustrations (pictorial group), and then took a learning test. Participants also took a battery of 14 cognitive measures related to the verbalizer-visualizer…

This study demonstrated that the modality principle applies to multimedia learning of regular science lessons in school settings. In the first field experiment, 27 Dutch secondary school students (age 16-17) received a self-paced, web-based multimedia lesson in biology. Students who received lessons containing illustrations and narration performed…

In Experiments 1A and 1B, students read a concise booklet containing 653 words and 6 illustrations describing the formation, propagation, and dispersion of ocean waves (concise group) or an expanded booklet containing 327 additional words and 5 additional illustrations describing relevant mathematical formulas and computations interspersed…

In 2 experiments, 280 college students studied animations depicting a mechanical operation with concurrent oral narration of the process, successive animation and narration, animation alone, narration alone, or no instruction (the control group). Results are consistent with a dual coding model of retention and problem solving. (SLD)