Universities are trending towards displacing traditional printed textbooks (p-books) with electronic textbooks (e-books), even though an incomplete body of knowledge exists about the learning value of using e-books as instructional materials. As a result, this dissertation study was conducted to determine if digital textbooks are as…

This study examines the influence of instructional design and management style on student achievement and satisfaction in a web-based distance learning environment. From the literature review, two major instructional design and management styles in web-based distance education were conceptualized as structure and interpersonal interaction. To…

In order to investigate the effects of sequence and synthesis in the teaching of taxonomically-related concepts, a study was conducted in which 27 students from Syracuse University were asked to examine printed instructions dealing with kinds of sailboats and then to respond to a test based on those instructions. The synthesizing structure…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of an expert instructional system used to provide timely and quality feedback about the quality of a variety of visual materials production techniques to undergraduate students in a basic instructional materials production class. One group of students generated its own feedback by using the expert system, and…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of instruction that is organized in two alternative formats--hierarchical (Gagne, 1962) and elaborated (Reigeluth, 1979)--on learner's recall and application of content-specific principles. Sixty-nine college juniors and seniors enrolled in an education media production course studied one of two…

Content organization and its effects on prose learning were the focus of this study. Organizational chunking during the encoding or reading interval with an instructional booklet and batched postquestions during the retrieval period (including all events between initial learning and the retention test) were used with 112 university students to…

The effects of various interactive video instructional control options and practice on learning were examined in this study. The interactive video lesson was a 30-minute videotape designed to introduce cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Subjects were 48 graduate and undergraduate volunteers, none of whom had prior experience with CPR or…

This paper proposes a method for studying the effect of an individual difference variable--field dependence-independence--on the ability of a student to read and understand text information presented on a computer screen. It is argued that in order to improve individualized instruction, learning must be related to predictions of what part of the…

This paper contains the results of a study on the importance of discovery learning using computer simulations. The purpose of the study was to identify what constitutes discovery learning and to assess the effects of instructional support measures. College students were observed working with an assignment and a computer simulation in the domain of…

INSCAL multidimensional scaling, an objective methodology for formulating effective technical information sequences for computer-assisted instruction, was shown to be of value with respect to defining the information complexity of technical material, developing sequences of key concepts within technical material, and providing an index of expert…

This study examined the effectiveness of observable visual imagery strategy for the encoding of verbal information with special attention given to the relative effectiveness of the strategy for field-dependent and field-independent learners. The subjects, 54 undergraduate and graduaute students ranging in age from 20 to 54, were randomly assigned…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of different levels of visual elaborations and practice on application learning of adults in a computer-based science lesson. A total of 141 university students participated in an introductory lesson covering Newtonian mechanics. Three levels of visual elaboration (static graphic, animated…

This study examined the effects of feedback (immediate, delayed, or no feedback) and the type of control (external or internal) on computer-assisted instruction (CAI), and also considered the influence on achievement of such factors as computer anxiety, self-concept, learning style, and gender. Subjects were 336 undergraduates, the majority of…

Questions related to the instructional design of computer-based educational systems were addressed in a study in which college psychology majors completed a computer-based course in statistics using instructional units developed to teach the desired knowledge within the context of situations to which the knowledge is relevant--a technique called…

This study addressed the assessment and development of problem-solving skills of college students. A mathematics-oriented computer-assisted instruction (CAI) program with an embedded general problem-solving strategy was developed. A related computer-managed instruction (CMI) module maintained student progress and phased out the problem-solving…