College students viewed a short multimedia PowerPoint presentation consisting of 16 narrated slides explaining lightning formation (Experiment 1) or 8 narrated slides explaining how a car's braking system works (Experiment 2). Each slide appeared for approximately 8-10 s and contained a diagram along with 1-2 sentences of narration spoken in a…

This study examined the effects and interaction of multiple and linear visual presentation modes and cognitive style on performance in a visual location task. Subjects were 132 undergraduate college students (40 males, 92 females) in professional education courses. The Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT, Wilkin et al., 1971) was used to identify…

In order to compare the instructional effectiveness of realistic and non-realistic color cueing on visualized instruction, an instructional unit on the human heart, using slides and an audiotape, was presented to 244 college students. Four treatment groups received the same oral presentation, with the addition of different types of visual…

In a study that was conducted to measure performance as a function of multimedia instructions, 360 college students in a University of Colorado introductory psychology course were taught to build a model helicopter from an assembly kit. Their instructions consisted of either viewing a narrated film (one or two viewings), or hands-on practice using…

A study was made to determine whether instructional cues presented to the learner as variations of audiovisual and textual information including a cue summation condition (combined textual, pictorial, and auditory cues) can facilitate the achievement of precise instructional objectives. Some 112 education students enrolled in a course on mental…

A research project involving 16 experiments investigated the nature of the encoding process for verbal materials, particularly differences arising from mode of presentation. The results showed that a change in mode of presentation of items produced a recovery from interference in short term retention. Since intermodal interference was lower than…

To determine whether students gain more knowledge and stronger impressions from reading a play or from viewing the play on videotape, two groups of college students were presented with an excerpt from Arthur Miller's "Incident at Vichy." One group was to read the excerpt and the other group was to view the same excerpt from a public…