INFLUENCE OF INTERACTIVE VIDEOS ON ACHIEVEMENT, RETENTION AND COGNITIVE LOAD
Abstract
Through the diffusion of information and communication technologies, the learning contents which are crucial components of the learning process, have transformed and varied. In the past the learning contents used to be made up of only texts. They have now been transformed into multimedia and videos materials supported with audio-visual elements. This transformation has paved the way for a learning culture based on videos throughout the world. New-generation mass education environments (e.g., MOOCs) based on videos, video-sharing websites with open-source codes and mobile technologies have all played an important role in the development of this video-based learning culture. Learners can now access freely to millions of educational videos regarding any subject they want to learn.
Although videos act as a popular learning environment, the learner is in a passive position in video-based learning. Interactive videos, in contrast with the traditional videos, keep the learning active in the learning process, allow learners to demonstrate instant responses, prevent loss of motivation and make the interest in the learning content permanent. That is, interactive videos, different from traditional ones, put students in an active position rather than making them passive audiences. While watching an interactive video, students can respond to the questions directed to them via the video, receive feedback regarding their responses and make reflections upon the video content. This process can be evaluated by the teacher in online environments. In this way, teachers have the opportunity to monitor their students’ learning via videos. Thanks to these features of interactive videos, they take place among up-to-date learning environments. In the related literature, there is limited experimental research on the contributions of these quite new videos to learning. Therefore, the present study was carried out to determine the influence of interactive and non-interactive presentation of a video on academic achievement and cognitive load.
The study was carried out through a post-test only control group design. It was conducted within the scope of the undergraduate course of Multimedia Design with a total of 60 undergraduate students at an instructional technology department. In the study, to prevent sailing effect, a nine-minute educational video on the subject of renewable energy, which does not have a direct relationship with the participants’ education, was used as the learning content. For the purpose of including interaction in the video, an achievement test, which was prepared for the aforementioned education video, was applied. Each question in the achievement test would appear automatically on the screen immediately after the presentation of the related subject in the video, and the achievement test was prepared in a way to make the student respond to the question. In this process, the web application called Edpuzzle, one of media used to create interactive videos, was used. The application allows creating a user profile, producing interactive videos, sharing these videos with students and colleagues, receiving feedback regarding the videos and sharing these interactive videos in other platforms. For the control group, non-interactive educational videos were presented, and the same achievement test was applied to the students after they watched the videos. Regarding the reliability of the achievement tests in both groups, ideal internal consistency coefficients were obtained. Besides the achievement test, for the purpose of determining the cognitive load caused by the learning content on both groups at the end of the learning process, a single-item subjective rating scale developed by Paas and Van Merrienboer (1993) was used. Taking this five-point Likert-type scale with its choices ranging between “I had great difficulty” and “I had no difficulty” into account, the participants were asked to define the cognitive load caused on them by the learning content immediately after the video-content. The purpose was to examine the influence of the interactive feature included in the video on retention. In order to determine the extent to which, the participants remembered the learning contents presented them via the videos, the achievement test was re-applied to the experimental and control groups two weeks after the application, and the results of the achievement test were compared using independent samples t-test.
The findings demonstrated that the academic achievement level of the experimental group who used the interactive video was higher than that of the control group who used the non-interactive one. The results of analysis conducted for the cognitive load revealed that the cognitive load was higher in the group using the non-interactive video content. When the results of the achievement test applied two weeks after the application were examined, it was seen that the experimental group remembered the learning content better than the control group. Depending on these findings, it could be stated that interactive videos make important contributions to the learning process in terms of academic achievement.
Keywords: Video, Interactive Systems