MULTIMEDIA AND COMPREHENSION - A COGNITIVE STUDY

Tests were carried out on 120 grade 6 students to compare Compton's Mu ltimedia Encyclopedia on CD-ROM and its printed equivalent in terms of students' ability to recall information and to draw inferences from i t. Between-subject variables were three presentation conditions (print ed text with illustrations, text-on-screen, and multimedia-text, still images, and animation) and a retrieval condition (topic retrieved bef ore viewing/topic presented without retrieval). Within-subject variabl es were text complexity (complex or simple), text type (descriptive or procedural), and measure (propositions recalled versus propositions i nferred). Presentation conditions produced no significant main effect although text-on-screen resulted in somewhat higher recall and multime dia resulted in somewhat higher inference scores. Multimedia had the g reatest effect in the case of the simple topics, and especially the si mple procedural topic.