The effects of multimedia design features on primary school learning materials

Numerous experimental settings have illustrated the modality effect. These studies have a number of clear characteristics: respondents are mainly higher education students, information addresses procedures or processes, and learner-control is generally limited. In order to explore the boundaries of the modality effect in this study an experiment was carried out with primary school children and 12 conditions: three conditions with respect to the relationship between text and pictures (nonintegrated text separate, integrated text, and auditory text), two image modalities (static versus dynamic) and two conditions with respect to learner-control. These twelve conditions were tested for two sets of materials (one with descriptive and one with procedural information), resulting in a total number of 24 conditions. Each condition had 10 participants. Learning gains (knowledge and transfer) were calculated and total study time as well as study time for each screen was registered. Analysis of variance revealed no main effects of conditions for learning gains with respect to retention or transfer. Some interaction effects deserve further research attention. By analyzing the total study time some main effects and interaction effects were found for both sets of materials.status: publishe