An investigation of the effect of forced pauses on comprehension of material in an interactive video instructional system

This study investigated the effect of pause duration and pause location on achievement, lesson completion time, and student ratings of difficulty and information load for an interactive videodisc instructional program about DNA structure. One hundred fifteen college undergraduate students from an educational psychology course and a restaurant and hotel management course were randomly assigned to one of seven versions of a level 3 interactive videodisc lesson. The only differences among the programs were the location, after objectives, after content, and after summary, and duration, 20 and 40 seconds, of the pauses. A message directing the students to review the material was presented during the pauses. The experiment utilized a 2 x 3 factorial with control group posttest only design. The control group had a pause duration of 0 seconds and therefore could not be classified for location. Subjects in the 40 second pause duration scored significantly higher than those in the 20 second for the 2 x 3, alpha = 0.05. However, no significant differences were found when compared to the control group. The control group was found to be nonhomogeneous with the 2 x 3 for achievement and may have been sufficiently different to cover any possible effect. Although location did not have an effect on achievement, evidence was found suggesting it may have the effect of encouraging learners to actively review the material, especially for the after content location. Pause duration had no effect on the completion time; however, pause location did. The after summary location had faster completion times than either of the other locations and was about the same as the control group