Abstract
Various studies demonstrated that multimedia learning improves when text and pictures are presented contiguously in time rather than separately – the temporal contiguity effect. The present study investigated whether this advantage is restricted to only novice learners (novices) or also extends to more knowledgeable learners (expert), and whether it depends on the length of instructional segments. Learners with varied levels of expertise (experts vs. novices) learned about basketball game system in five different experimental conditions. In the first three conditions, an entire video clip and audio text were presented either at the same time or the video clip was presented before or after the entire audio (macro-step presentations). In the remaining two conditions, short segments of the video clip were presented before or after corresponding short segments of the audio (micro-step presentations). Overall, novice learners benefited more from the concurrent presentation (combination of learning and mental effort scores); in addition, and in the case of macro-step presentations novices performed better when the audio segment preceded the video clip segment. However, experts benefited more from the micro-step presentations, demonstrating an expertise reversal effect.
Highlights
Recent advances in information technology and graphics have enabled the production of powerful and effective learning settings
The analysis indicated a significant presentation by expertise interaction, F(4,140) = 13.28, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.27, indicating that the differences in recall among the presentations vary as a function of expertise
The experiment reported in this paper was designed to investigate the relation between levels of player expertise, the length of learning segments, and the effectiveness of temporal contiguity principle in the domain of basketball measured by the three dependent measures – visual recall, verbal recall and mental effort
Summary
Recent advances in information technology and graphics have enabled the production of powerful and effective learning settings. Understanding an illustrated document requires the selection and organization of the relevant elements (pictures and/or words), the activation of relevant prior knowledge, and the construction of links between the individual’s verbal and pictorial mental models of the information beforehand, so that the two models can be integrated with each other and with prior knowledge This integration is expected to be easier if the two sources of information that should be linked together are held in working memory at the same time (temporal contiguity, see Ginns, 2006; Mayer, 2009, for an overview). The temporal contiguity effect has often been replicated with different materials and procedures, resulting in the general recommendation to avoid the non-contiguous presentation of words and pictures in time (for similar results, see Mayer and Anderson, 1992; Mayer and Sims, 1994)
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