Students' and teachers' perceptions of motivation and learning through the use in schools of multimedia encyclopaedias on CD-ROMs

This article is the result of interviews with teachers, students, and school librarians in eight UK secondary schools regarding their use of multimedia encyclopaedias on CD-ROM. It focuses on a content analysis of their comments on how having access to multimedia encyclopaedias changes the way students work and learn in school, how they perceive it enhances their learning, and how it hinders it. Teachers reported that they used multimedia encyclopaedias as an additional information resource, or because their use was mo-tivating to the students. Some said that having multimedia ency-clopaedias had no effect on their teaching. However, they were not so much using multimedia resources within their teaching, but sending students out of their lessons to the library to use them. The most important factor, by far, in the students motivation to use multimedia encyclopaedias in school was that they found them quick and easy to use. There was also strong support for motivation through the graphics, video, and sound on the CD-ROM. There was some support for the students being motivat-ed because they were allowed to be in control of their learning