The Effects of Multimedia Cues on Student Cognition in an Electronically Delivered High School Unit of Instruction

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 a electronically delivered unit of instruction. This research tested the theory of cuesummation (multiple cues across multiple channels) in a high school agricultural education setting and measured the effectiveness of the instruction. Curriculum materials were created and placed on CD-ROM for asynchronous delivery capability. Materials comprised a week-long unit of instruction on milk processing and were developed in three Treatments (Tx). The first Tx consisted of textonly materials, the second consisted of text and an audio/video component and the third consisted of audio/video and still images. These three Txs represented single cue, redundancy and cue summation, respectively. One hundred five high school agriculture science students participated in the study. Instrumentation used included a pretest/posttest for cognition as well as a researcher-developed demographic instrument. Data were collected in the fall of 2003 and analyzed using ANOVA techniques to determine significant differences among the Tx groups. The researcher found that students scored significantly higher on the posttest when exposed to Txs containing an audio/video component. Recommendations include continued research as well as incorporating these findings into current curriculum development efforts for the betterment of the learners involved. Cue-summation produced student performance scores similar to redundancy.