Partial Verbal Redundancy in Multimedia Presentations for Writing Strategy Instruction

Abstract

SummaryMultimedia instructional materials require learners to select, organize, and integrate information across multiple modalities. To facilitate these comprehension processes, a variety of multimedia design principles have been proposed. This study further explores the redundancy principle by manipulating the degree of partial redundancy between written and narrated content. Ninety high school students learned about cohesion via animated lesson videos from the Writing Pal intelligent tutoring system. Videos were crafted such that narrated and onscreen written content overlapped by 10%, 26%, or 50%. Across conditions, students gained significantly in their knowledge of cohesion‐building strategies and the effects of cohesion on writing quality. However, degree of redundancy did not influence learning gains. Additionally, although more‐skilled readers outperformed less‐skilled readers, reading skill did not interact with the degree of redundancy. These results provide evidence that a broad range of partially redundant multimedia materials may be viable instructional tools that benefit diverse learners. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Effects of Modality and Pace on Achievement, Mental Effort, and Positive Affect in Multimedia Learning Environments

“…It can be said that modality effect is not clear in teaching social science subjects when compared with science subjects. Parallel to this research, in Roscoe, Jacovina, Harry, Russell, and McNamara (2015)'s research that taught of a subject with a social science content (strategies for making writing more cohesive), it was found that increasing redundant on-screen text along with narration did not influence students' achievement. But redundancy principle (Mayer, 2009) says that increasing redundant on-screen text decreases achievement.…”

Two types of redundancy in multimedia learning: a literature review

“…1 and 2], found positive effects of short compared to identical written text. In contrast, Dooley (2015) , Roscoe et al (2015) , and Wu (2011) found that of the degree of overlap between written text and narration accompanied by visualizations had no effect.…”

“…Another question arises regarding the quantity of content overlap. As Roscoe et al (2015) show, the degree of content overlap between narration and written text varies significantly. Determining the overlap between visualization and textual information is much more difficult.…”

The Relation between the Awareness Level of Writing Strategies and Writing Self-Efficacy

“…At the present day multimedia, web connected computers and the use of internet, present a series of informative communication and broadcasting devices that bring the world to the students (Pierson, 2014). Moreover it is known that the use of multimedia instructional materials has very important positive contributions to the writing education (Roscoe, Jocovina, Harry, Russell, & Mcnamara, 2015). Also in a research carried out by Tanti it is indicated that digital correspondence can be used in the development of reading-writing skills (2012).…”