The Multimedia Expanse: Students' perceived learning outcome from, and attitudes toward, multimodal and traditional lectures

The purpose of this study was to examine students' attitudes toward multimodal presentations (AtMP) and traditional lectures (AtTL). A literature review of current research on this topic suggests that students generally have more positive attitudes toward the former rather than the latter, but few of these studies has a focal point on different study programmes and students within hard and soft sciences. Similarly, media literacy and technology ambivalence is seldom seen in relation with students' perception of instructional mediums, and the distinction between methods and mediums seems to be mostly ignored. Set within a Norwegian context and observed through the lens of what Richard Mayer and his colleagues define as the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning, the current study intended to measure whether a relationship existed between students' attitudes toward the two instructional mediums, media literacy and four study programmes (psychology, dentistry, education and medicine). The study was quantitative in design addressing seven research questions. One hundred and sixty-five students, attending either the university or a university college in Bergen, completed a questionnaire presented during four separate plenary lectures. The attitude scales (AtMP and AtTL), serving as the main instruments in the study, were built upon four items measuring the students' perception of the lecture structure, learning outcome, motivation to attend lectures and interaction between students and lecturer when one of the two lecturing mediums were used. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were applied (correlation, one-way analysis of variance and regression). The results indicated a strong negative relationship between AtMP and AtTL, meaning positive attitudes toward one would likely signify negative attitudes toward the other. Medicine students differed significantly from all the other study programmes, favouring traditional lectures over multimodal presentations. Furthermore, there was a positive relationship between students' perception of their lecturers' media literacy, didactic awareness and AtMP, though no such relationship was found with AtTL. Implications of this study suggested that many of the students wish for more complex multimodal presentations in their lectures; moreover, it should not be taken for granted that students are undivided positive toward indiscriminate use of PowerPoint or similar software. The discussion concludes that more research is needed on the actual use of multimodal presentations in Norwegian higher education