By: Steve Patterson
Submitted: 2010-09-07 01:17:17 | Word Count: 730
Educators have examined the impact of media on learning since at least 1912, when the American psychologist Edward L. Thorndike recommended pictures as a labor saving device for instruction. Five questions about media and learning will be briefly examined. The first section will define media and summarize the results of research on learning from media, the relative cost of media use, and the impact of media on access to education. The second section describes new research on the economic benefits of instructional media, including suggestions for "cognitive efficiency" studies. The third section presents new information about learning problems caused by poor design of instructional media "displays." The fourth part will examine claims that new media enhance student's motivation to learn. The final section will describe work on technology integration that focuses on learning how to solve problems.
Definitions and Summary of Research
Media are generally defined as the means by which information is conveyed from one place to another. In the past century, various forms of media have been used to convey instruction and to support learning. Examples of instructional media include traditional means of delivering instruction (chalkboards, textbooks, overhead projectors, and teachers), mass media used for education (newspapers, movies, radio, and television), and the newer "electronic" instructional media (computers, interactive video, and multimedia systems). All instruction requires the selection and use of at least one medium to deliver instruction. Many alternative media and mixtures of media may be chosen for any given learning goal and group of students. Thus, research questions have compared the learning benefits of various media and mixes of media for different types of learning goals and students at different ages and aptitude levels. Thousands of studies have been and continue to be conducted.
Do some media produce more learning than others? In his 2001 book Learning from Media, Richard E. Clark concluded that there are no learning benefits from any specific medium or mix of media. He summarized the research on this issue in an analogy that is often repeated: "The best … evidence is that media are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition. Basically, the choice of vehicle might influence the cost or extent of distributing instruction, but only the content of the vehicle can influence achievement" (p. 13). While some media will not convey certain types of information necessary for learning (for example, newspapers cannot transmit sound or "real-time" visual events), any necessary information can be conveyed by a number of media (sound and visual events can be conveyed by many media other than newspapers). A more positive way to state this conclusion is that educators can expect similar levels of learning from a great variety of media provided that essential instructional methods are used. When more than one medium can provide the instructional method needed for learning, the choice of medium is based on expected economic benefits such as the per-student cost of instruction, not learning benefits. An alternative view was expressed in 1994 by Robert B. Kozma, who contended that media and method should not be separated.
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Media and method. The key issue here is that when media are used for instruction, they may often be confused with the instructional methods and information they convey. For example, computer-based instruction is often thought to be highly "interactive" because computers permit high levels of exchange between student and computer-delivered instructional programs. Yet most media permit interaction, although some media do so more quickly and economically.
Any medium seems to be able to increase learning provided that the information content and instructional methods they convey are adequate to support student learning. The existing research suggests that when learning is influenced by external events, those events must support the use of mental processes that are required for learning goals by students who are unable or unwilling to provide them for themselves. The specification for these external events is what Clark called an "instructional method." Instances of common instructional methods are learning plans, examples, and practice exercises with interactive, corrective feedback. Since a variety of media will present any of the common instructional methods required to learn, the benefits of media are not in their impact on learning but instead in their economic impact and their capacity to increase access to educational information and instructional programs.
