Learners invest more mental effort in media they perceive as difficult, so multimedia should raise perceived demand characteristics¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · review r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 1993 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Learners invest more mental effort in media they perceive as difficult than those they perceive as easy; less effort is exerted viewing video than reading comparable content in books. → Innwoo Park and Michael J. Hannafin 1993

Evidence¶

Innwoo Park and Michael J. Hannafin 1993¶

Innwoo Park and Michael J. Hannafin. (1993). Empirically-Based Guidelines for the Design of Interactive Multimedia. Educational Technology Research and Development, Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 63-85. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30218388

q2 · i? · review · r2

The review attributes to Salomon (1984) that "Learners invest more mental ef- fort in media they perceive as difficult than those they perceive as easy," and that because television is perceived as passive and easy, less effort is exerted viewing video than reading comparable book content. The stated implication is to embed activities that increase the perceived demand characteristics of both the media and the learning activities.

"Learners invest more mental ef- fort in media they perceive as difficult than those they perceive as easy."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Expert example standards increase subjective task difficulty and mental effort during example evaluation — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Prior knowledge and intervention condition predict repeated cognitive load and interest measures: prior knowledge lowers effort and difficulty and raises interest and understanding, and prompting groups perceive tasks as more difficult — related
• Learners reported higher perceived learning and satisfaction and lower mental effort with the instructor video, despite no performance gains — a perception-performance gap — related
• Learners invest more effort in tasks they perceive as interesting, personally important, or useful to their future goals. — related
• Segmenting complex dynamic visualizations into pieces with pauses improves learning outcomes, especially transfer performance, at least for novices, compared with non-segmented presentations — related
• Model-observer gender combination affects mental effort invested during example study: male students invest less effort with a male model, female students more effort with a male model — related
• In-between learning activities increased invested mental effort in reading the second text unit (Experiment 2) — related
• Multimedia initial instruction lowers students' perceived difficulty of problems across instruction, practice, and posttest phases — reports the opposite