Educational content of many kinds and from many disciplines are increasingly presented in the form of short videos made broadly accessible via platforms such as YouTube. We argue that understanding how such communicative forms function effectively (or not) demands a more thorough theoretical foundation in the principles of multimodal communication that is also capable of engaging with, and driving, empirical studies. We introduce the basic concepts adopted and discuss an empirical study showing how functional measures derived from the theory of multimodality we employ and results from a recipient-based study that we conducted align. We situate these results with respect to the state of the art in cognitive research in multimodal learning and argue that the more complex multimodal interactions and artifacts become, the more a fine-grained view of multimodal communication of the kind we propose will be essential for engaging with such media, both theoretically and empirically.
Recent research on expert teachers suggests that an integrated understanding across the core domains of teachers’ knowledge is crucial for their professional competence. However, in initial teacher education pre-service teachers seem to struggle with the integration of knowledge represented in multiple domain-specific sources into a coherent structure (e.g., textbooks that focus either on content knowledge, on content-specific pedagogical knowledge, or on general pedagogical knowledge). The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of writing tasks (unspecific vs. argumentative) and prompts (i.e., focus questions) on pre-service teachers’ construction of a mental model that interrelates information from multiple domain-specific documents. Data of ninety-two pre-service teachers, who participated in a laboratory experiment where they read three domain-specific textbook excerpts and wrote essays for global comprehension, were analyzed using automated structural and semantic measures. In line with prior research, results indicated that prompts supported pre-service teachers in integrating domain-specific knowledge from multiple documents in their mental models. However, the automated structural and semantic measures did not support previous findings on the efficacy of argument tasks for knowledge integration. The findings and limitations are discussed, and conclusions are drawn for future research and for integrative learning environments in pre-service teacher education.
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