Abstract

The purpose of this discussion is to explain and sharpen different points of view about the impact of media and attributes of media on learning, motivation and efficiency gains from instruction. This paper is an attempt to INTRODUCTION A Brief History of Media Research The claim of "no learning benefits" from media has been made and substantiated many times in the past. Many researchers have argued that media have differential economic benefits but no learning benefits. For example, in the first Handbook of Research on Teaching, Lumsdaine (1963) concluded that the benefits of media were primarily economic and that their use was "to develop the technology of instructional method" (p. 669). The Important Aspects of the Learning From Media Argument My early articles A Replaceability Challenge It may be useful to apply the following "armchair experimental criteria" to any situation where it appears that media or attributes of media have been instrumental in fostering learning gains: We need to ask whether there are other media or another set of media attributes that would yield similar learning gains. The question is critical because if different media or attributes yield similar learning gains and facilitate achievement of necessary performance criteria, then in a design science or an instructional technology, we must always choose the less expensive way to achieve a learning goal. We must also form our theories around the underlying structural features of the shared properties of the interchangeable variables and not base theory on the irrelevant surface features. I challenge Robert Kozma and other colleagues in this area to find evidence, in a well designed study, of any instance of a medium or media attributes that are not replaceable by a different set of media and attributes to achieve similar learning results for any given student and learning task. This replaceability test is the key to my argument since if a treatment can be replaced by another treatment with similar results, the cause of the results is in some shared (and uncontrolled) properties of both treatments. Of course it is important for instructional designers to know that there are a variety of treatments that will produce a desired learning goal. However, the utility of this knowledge is largely economic. The designer can and must choose the less expensive and most cognitively efficient way to represent and deliver instruction. It cannot be argued that any given medium or attribute must be present in order for learning to occur, only that certain media and attributes are more efficient for certain learners, learning goals and tasks. This allows the discussion, and our mental set as theorists, to shift from media attributes as causal in learning to media attributes as causal in the cost-effectiveness of learning. While this may seem a small shift in the representation of the problem, it would have major consequences for instructional research, theory and for design. Cognitive instructional theory can shift to a concern with instructional methods that support the structural elements of cognitive processing during learning and transfer. What is an Instructional Method, and How is it Different From a Medium? An instructional method is any way to shape information that activates, supplants or compensates for the cognitive processes necessary for achievement or motivation A Confusion of Technologies In a presentation for the Association for Educational Communications and Technology at their 1987 Atlanta convention I attributed our media research and practice problem to a "confusion of technologies" Motivation With Media