Multimedia Presentations and Learning: A Laboratory Experiment.

Do multimedia presentations influence learning? Anecdotal reports suggest that multimedia presentations can improve students' understanding, enthusiasm, class attendance and satisfaction. Little empirical evidence is available to evaluate these claims, however. This study examines the impact of a multimedia presentation on recall in a controlled setting. Relying on Dual Coding Theory, we hypothesize that multiple, sensorial stimuli in a multimedia presentation improve recall, particularly among students who prefer to represent information graphically. The results indicate that multimedia does not uniformly lead to higher recall, but that students who prefer to represent information graphically (as did the majority of participants in this study), benefit from the multimedia presentation. Students who prefer verbal representation may actually be hindered by multimedia. More positive attitudes toward the presentation and presenter are associated with multimedia, regardless of preferred representation style. These findings should be helpful to instructors in evaluating costs and benefits associated with implementing multimedia in the classroom.