The Use of a Multimedia-Enabled, Serialized Worked-Example Artifact in an Online Environment for Secondary Education

Abstract

High school students in rural and semi-rural areas are disadvantaged because their schools struggle to attract and retain instructors who are qualified to teach career and technology courses that ready students for the knowledge economy. The effects of the pandemic moved much knowledge-economy work online by adopting study-from-home (SFH) models; however, educational institutions have been slow to validate corresponding study-from-home instructional models. In response, the current study developed study-from-home instruction using a multimedia-enabled, serialized worked-example artifact to teach financial accounting and modeling for high school students. The study featured grounded theories that inform the design of SFH instruction and online facilitation for a yearlong study. The instruction aimed to promote the far transfer of domain-specific, career-development knowledge regarding financial accounting and modeling. To do so, authors conducted a quasi-experiment with 50 students from five public high schools in rural and semi-rural East Texas. The result shows that socially situated SFH instruction whose design follows the principles of cognitive load theory, situated learning, and cognitive apprenticeship promoted mastery-of-learning outcomes over the course of an academic year. Our findings indicate a promising new direction in the design of remote instruction that delivers complex content to small-screen mobile devices for high school students.