The Impact of Spoken Instructions on Learner Behavior Following Multimedia Tutorial Instruction.

The choice of what to include in educational software is an issue with which instructional designers are regularly concerned. Multimedia capacity, standard on today's desktop computers, gives designers the opportunity to provide learners a more exciting learning experience than simply looking, clicking, and then looking some more. One feature that can make multimedia software different than such conventional media as books is the technological capacity to include sound. This capacity is already available to educational software developers regardless of whether they are producing instruction in fixed media or networked form. Recent interest in the use of sound to enhance learning (Bishop and Cates, 2001a) suggests, however, that although there is reason to believe that sound can enhance learning, that sound is used infrequently. One reason given for the scarcity of software that incorporates sound is a lack of experimental evidence indicating a significant learning improvement when sound is present. While some experimental evidence supports combining sound with other media (Lai, 2000; Moreno & Mayer, 2000; Nocente, 1996), few experiments have directly compared textual and spoken presentations while maintaining content and visual information. For instructional designers seeking to accommodate different learning preferences by offering products that facilitate multiple learning modalities, or for those seeking to accommodate learners with reading or visual impairment, it makes sense to examine whether learning by listening can match or surpass learning by reading. This paper presents a different point of view. Instead of looking for significant learning improvements in the presence of sound, it looks instead at differences in the ways learners behave when sound is introduced. With this kind of information, it becomes possible to plan to take advantage of the strengths of sound for accomplishing different parts of the instructional mission. Another reason that sound is not often included in educational software is that it simply costs more in terms of time, money, and computer resources to include it than to leave it out. Sound is an investment that can only weakly point to learning improvement, and then usually only in combination with other interventions. So, unless it can be shown that sound can lead to some kind of improvement in learning, there is little reason to include it. This paper investigates the effect of sound as a presentation modality on the way students review procedures learned at the moment the procedures are first being applied. It reports on a series of three experiments conducted at various times in the one and a half years before October of 2004. The findings of each experiment generated the questions investigated in subsequent experiments, with the result that the experiments form a series. The outcome of the series is that there appears to be an effect on student reviewing habits that is influenced by the modality in which the review material is presented. This takes the form of a preference for listening to the presentation when the desire to complete the task makes it important to know how it is done and when learning on the first time through was incomplete.