Abstract:
The development of electronic curriculum materials holds great promise and rewards for both educators and learners alike, but little research has been conducted to determine the effectiveness of incorporating multimedia components within an electronically-delivered unit of instruction. This research tested the theory of cue-summation (multiple cues across multiple channels) in a high school agricultural education setting and measured the effectiveness of the instruction and satisfaction level of the student. Curriculum materials were created and placed on compact disks (CD-ROM) for asynchronous delivery capability. Materials comprised a week-long unit of instruction on milk processing and were developed in three treatments; text-only materials, text and an audio/video component, and audio/video and still images. These three treatments represented single cue, redundancy, and cue summation, respectively. One-hundred and five high school agriculture education students participated in the study. Instrumentation used included a pretest/post-test for cognition as well as researcher developed satisfaction and demographic instruments. The researchers found that students in treatments containing audio/video components scored significantly higher on the post-test than students who received text-only. Redundancy and cue-summation produced statistically similar posttest scores; however, students in the cue summation treatment group reported significantly higher satisfaction scores than students in the redundant condition group.
Keywords:
Instruction, post-test satisfaction, electronic-delivery, cue summation theory, student, Brashears, Baker
 Download Article | [ ] | 751 kB |
