Many learning environments involve rituals for rehearsal and reflection. Musicians, for instance, spend countless hours practicing scales and adjusting their bodies to increase their skills. But they do more than simply practice: They also play for instructors and others who can provide valuable critiques of their performances. Architectural…

The deployment of immersive, non-restrictive environments for instruction and learning presents a new set of challenges for instructional designers and educators. Adopting the conceptual frameworks of Sherin's (2002) learning while teaching and Vygotsky's (1978) cultural development via the mediation of tools, this paper explores one professor's…

The 46 papers is this volume represent some of the most current thinking in educational communications and technology. Individual papers address the following topics: gender differences in the selection of elective computer science courses and in the selection of non-traditional careers; instruction for individuals with different cognitive styles;…

The choice of what to include in educational software is an issue with which instructional designers are regularly concerned. Multimedia capacity, standard on today's desktop computers, gives designers the opportunity to provide learners a more exciting learning experience than simply looking, clicking, and then looking some more. One feature that…

College and university faculty face many demands on their time: research, teaching, service, committees, family, and other obligations. One of the major challenges faced by instructional support personnel at colleges and universities is to get their training efforts entered into the faculty members' busy calendars. This paper looks at a new option…

Researchers investigated differences in learner preferences for different types of instructional strategies and learning styles in online environments. Results suggested that matches between students' learning styles and instructional strategies did not affect their perception of their own learning outcomes, level of effort and involvement, and…

There's no keeping up with what teenagers think is in or out; status changes by the minute. But when you develop computer-based instruction (CBI) for that population of users, you'd like to know with some reliability that the program is in. At the least, you'd like to know that users won't respond by rolling their eyes. Such was the case with a…

The 54 papers in this volume represent some of the most current thinking in educational communications and technology. Individual papers address the following topics: feedback in computer-assisted instruction (CAI); cognitive style and cognitive strategies in CAI; persuasive film-making; learning strategies; computer technology and children's word…

This study investigated whether it was more beneficial to provide the learners in computer-based learning environments access to on demand (self-regulated) help after they committed an error in problem solving or for the learning environment to externally regulate the presentation of instructional help. Furthermore, two different resentational…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of design strategies for promoting students' self-regulated learning skills on students' self-regulation and achievements. Seven strategies for promoting students' SRL are identified through the literature review and applied into the experimental group: goal setting, self-evaluation,…

Animation is being used extensively for instructional purposes; however, it has not been found to be effective on measures of higher order learning (concepts, rules, procedures) within the knowledge acquisition and knowledge integration domains. The purpose of this study was to examine the instructional effectiveness of two visual scaffolding…

This article describes the purpose, development, and implementation of a cognitive-based instructional intervention and its impact on learning motivation. The study was conducted in a programming-based problemsolving course for first-year engineering students. The results suggest that the instructional intervention developed based on the…

The purpose of this study was to test the principle of modality by using audio to deliver verbal information when that information is designed to support non-verbal information such as animations in a computer-based lesson. This was done by comparing the effect of two types of audio support mechanisms- a simple support mechanism consisting of…

Current issues in educational communications and technology are addressed in this collection of 47 papers, in which research reports dominate. Topics discussed include factors related to the learner, e.g., problem-solving skills, motivation, comparison of instructional design strategies, effects of organizational cues and text layouts, and…

The papers in this collection of 71 individual papers and 3 symposiums represent some of the most current thinking in educational communications and technology. For the first time, a selected number of development papers sponsored by the Division for Instructional Development are included. Topics discussed include the effects of various conditions…