Instructional Treatments, Advance Organizers and Novice Performance on a Telecommunications Network

Abstract

Recent advances in technologies designed for general population use (eg. autobank, mobile phone, video recorder) necessitate users to acquire information quickly and easily, about how a particular device should be oeprated. However it is often the case that technological devices and accompanying instructions, are not ‘user-friendly’, and are difficult to operate for ‘lay learners’, since learning must often occur individually, without verbal instruction, or assistance from experts or teachers. The current study set out to investigate the usability of a mobile phone network in an experiment lasting 4 hours with 94 student participants. It aimed to investigate (a) how advance organizers might affect performance and (b) the interaction between cognitive ability and effects of advance organizers. Participants were allocated to three experimental conditions: control, ‘text’ advance organizer, and ‘graphic’ advance organizer. Results showed that the ‘text’ group performed better than the ‘graphic’ group, and that as predicted, both advance organizer groups performed better than the control group. Further, low ability groups (associative memory and verbal reasoning) performed better in advance organizer groups, especially the text condition, than the control group suggesting that the effect of an advance organizer can ameliorate the influence of low ability, on performance. High ability groups were relatively unaffected by the influence of advance organizers. Further research is needed with common technological devices, into the effects of advance organizers on different ability groups amongst the population at large.