Interaction Design IV:

“Engaging Students in Active learning: The Case for Personalized Multimedia Messages” by Roxana Moreno and Richard E. Mayer

The authors set out to test the hypothesis that personalized messages in a multimedia learning environment can enhance learning by promoting the elaboration of the materials and reducing processing load. The results found that personalized messaged resulted in improved problem-solving transfer ability and retention.

The authors’ assumption that self-referential language promotes the elaboration of instructional materials stems from psychological research which claims that people recall information better when it is encoded with respect to themselves then with respect to other frames of reference (Rogers et al., 1977). The authors predict that personalized dialogs will encourage learners to actively search for meaning (Anderson & Pearson, 1984; Doctorow, Wittrock, & Marks, 1978). Their second assumption is that “personalized messages are more consistent with our schemas for communicating in normal conversations and therefore require less cognitive effort to process” (725). Familiarity may also attribute to the easy in comprehending personalized prose, and Reeves and Nass (1996) provide evidence that people have a disposition to apply the same dynamics from human-human interaction to human-computer interactions.

The experiments required learners to view either a self-referencing or neutral multimedia simulation on lightning formation. The results showed that students who viewed the self-referencing version generated significantly more creative solutions on transfer tests. This may also be attributed to the idea that students are more motivated to understand material when they are more personally involved in their learning. When they are motivated to learn they form a mental model that can be applied to new and challenging situations.