UNDERSTANDING CHILDREN’S LEARNING FROM MULTIMEDIA INSTRUCTION MODEL

Abstract

The use of multimedia instructions for online learning has become very common particularly with the advances of the Internet technology. Consequently museums around the world utilize such information and communications technology (ICT) tools in order to provide richer learning experiences for their visitors. This paper discusses a study that investigated the relationship between multimedia instructional formats with individual cognitive learning preferences in a museum learning environment. A total of 91 school children age between 10 to 12 years old were randomly assigned into treatment groups based on their cognitive learning ratio. We employed a pre-test post-test quasi experimental design to reveal that general performance of the children exposed to the physical museum exhibits is better than the online museum environment. Although single cognitive learning preferences were evaluated, our findings suggest that analytics perform better than the who lists when exposed to the physical exhibits; whilst the result is reversed for the online exhibits environment. Verbalises were found to be better than visualises in the physical a museum context. Yet they were found to have slight differences when compared to visualises in an online environment. Our findings on the combined cognitive styles (CCS) show that the analytics-visualises mean scores were different between physical and online exhibits, compared to the other three CCS.