The intention was good: How promoting strategy use does not improve multimedia learning for secondary students

Abstract

Background. It is well established that successful learning with multimedia is challenging, especially for younger learners.Aims. It was investigated whether students would profit from instructional support regarding the use of multimedia learning strategies.Sample. Participants were high school students in 8 th , 9 th , and 10 th grade (N = 168).Methods. Participants were assigned to a no-support control group or one of four experimental groups. In the experimental groups, students received either only a multimedia strategy training before learning (training group) or the training was enriched by prompts (prompts before or during learning) or if-then plans (implementation intentions). In the training, multimedia learning strategies were introduced (e.g., linking information from text and picture). The prompts and implementation intentions were aimed at enhancing the application of the multimedia strategies conveyed through the training. Students learned about the process of mitosis by studying multimedia instructions and were tested regarding the acquired knowledge. It was expected that solely training students to use adequate multimedia learning strategies would not promote learning compared with the control group, rather, that additional support like prompts or implementation intentions would be necessary to enhance learning.Results. Although in the experimental groups, multimedia learning strategies were used more frequently especially in the beginning of the instructional unit, there were no effects on learning outcome.Conclusions. Promoting multimedia strategy use did not improve learning. The quality of the different instructional support measures and their suitability for the target groups are discussed as possible explanations for these findings.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

How to support learning with multimedia instruction: Implementation intentions help even when load is high

“…Moreover, it is noticeable that when the addressed cognitive strategies were used more frequently by the learners, an effect of implementation intentions on the learning outcome was shown (Experiment 1: Hoch et al, 2020a; Experiment 1: Stalbovs et al, 2015). By contrast, in some studies, implementation intentions did not lead to more frequent use of the addressed strategies, and no effect on learning outcomes could then be shown (Experiment 2b: Hoch et al, 2020a, 2021). However, not all experiments captured such indicators describing strategy use.…”

“…The effect has proven robust for the particular implementation intentions used here and for this particular learning material (Stalbovs et al, 2015). However, the findings were less robust when using the same implementation intentions but with other learning content with shorter learning durations (Hoch et al, 2020a, 2021). In addition, there was no effect when a similar implementation intention was used that addressed a different, less specific situational cue in the if‐part (Hoch et al, 2020b).…”

“…Implementation intentions have already proven effective in educational contexts (Bayer & Gollwitzer, 2007;Duckworth et al, 2013;Oettingen et al, 2015;Wieber et al, 2011) and have also been investigated to promote multimedia learning (Hoch et al, 2020a(Hoch et al, , 2020b(Hoch et al, , 2021Stalbovs et al, 2015). In these studies, learners were instructed with implementation intentions that specifically addressed cognitive processes in multimedia learning, such as the integration of text and pictures (e.g.…”

“…Even though prompts have been shown to enhance learning in some cases, their beneficial effects are not revealed consistently. In particular, studies have suggested that students sometimes fail to act upon the prompts (Bartholomé & Bromme, 2009; Hoch et al, 2021).…”

“…One might presume that challenges in self‐regulation are more likely to occur during longer learning sessions, as more comprehensive material inherently provides more opportunities to struggle with self‐regulation and requires sustained cognitive regulation. Furthermore, implementation intentions to support cognitive processes in multimedia learning have not been shown to be effective in a study with younger participants (Hoch et al, 2021). The study results, however, also showed that the young participants did not use the strategies very frequently, so it can be assumed that these learners might even need more guidance and possibly more intense training in said strategies to ensure their availability and not just their use.…”