Patricia Baggett

Encoding and retaining information in the visuals and verbals of an educational movie

This study shows that when viewers watching an educational movie are presented simultaneously with information in two media-visual and verbal /auditory, there is no competition fa resources. When encoding information in one medium, one is not hindered from encoding information in the other; even when visual and linguistic information are presented sequentially, doubling study time, the extraction of information is not increased. College students appear to be good dual media processors.

Memory for Explicit and Implicit Information in Picture Stories.

The nature of the memory representation of two types of information in picture stories is examined: surface information, arising directly from pictures which occur in the stories, and conceptual information, easily inferable when integrating the pictures into a connected story, but arising potentially also from pictures not in the stories. Differences in accessibility to these representations are inferred from reaction time differences. Results indicate that the observer makes, while viewing, inferences necessary to form a coherent story, that he rejects improbable pictures, that for at least three days he can separate pictures whose meaning fits the story but which he has not seen from pictures he actually saw; and that he answers written questions about the storys meaning from a conceptual rather than a surface memory representation.

Information in Content Equivalent Movie and Text Stories.

New methods of data analysis are introduced to assess similarities and differences in responses of junior high and college students to the “same” story presented as movie vs. text. First, ways to determine to what degree a movie and text are the same in content are specified. Then, using a response task of ordering 23 photos or sentences from the story, an out‐of‐order score is introduced to quantify the amount of difference between the actual and recalled story order. The score is converted to bits of information, and a model of the response task, with four encoding and four problem solving parameters, is developed. Different amounts of information can be assigned to different parameters in the model. Children encode movie better than text, but adults encode them equally well. Adults are better problem solvers than children, but children have a transient text memory which helps them solve the problem of ordering sentences. An analysis using linguistic vs. pictorial cohesion explains why people make the e...

Four principles for designing instructions

This paper gives four principles for preparing multimedia instructional sequences and experimental methods for applying the principles. It also describes the empirical experiments on which the principles are based. Principle 1 is a criterion for good terminology for unfamiliar objects, actions, and situations, with methods for deriving such terminology. Principle 2 tells how to overlap visual and spoken elements in time (as in a movie or a lecture with slides) to form good associations. Principle 3 states that division of instructions into conceptual units should agree with peoples natural conceptualization. A method is presented for finding the natural conceptualization. Principle 4 treats mixing audiovisual instruction with hands-on practice in learning a procedure.