For whom is a Picture worth a thousand words? Extensions of a dual-coding theory of multimedia learning

Artículo escrito por Richard Mayer y Valery Sims
Journal of Educational Psychology. Vol. 86, N°3 p. 389-401 (indexada)

In 2 experiments, high- and low-spatial ability students viwed a computer-generated animation and listened simultaneously (concurrent group) or successively (successive group) to a narration that explained the workings either of a bicycle tire pump (Experiment 1) or of the human respiratory system (Experiment 2). The concurrent group generated more creative solutions to subsequent transfer problems than did the successive group; this contiguity effect was strong for high- but not for low-spatial ability students. Consistent with a dual-coding theory, spatial ability allows high-spatial learners to devote more cognitive resources to building referential connections between visual and verbal representations of the presented material, whereas low-spatial ability learners must devote more cognitive resources to building representation connections between visually presented material and its visual representation