Mayer, R.E., & Anderson, R.B. (1991). Animations need narrations: an experimental test of a dual-coding hypothesis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 83(4), 484-490.

Mayer, R.; Anderson, R.

1991

Mayer, R.E., & Anderson, R.B. (1991). Animations need narrations: an experimental test of a dual-coding hypothesis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 83(4), 484-490.

3

In 2 experiments, mechanically naive college students viewed an animation depicting the operation of a bicycle tire pump that included a verbal description given before (words-beforepictures) or during (words-with-pictures) the animation. The words-with-pictures group outperformed the words-before-pictures group on tests of creative problem solving that involved reasoning about how the pump works. In a follow-up experiment, students in the words-withpicturesgroup performed better on the problem-solving test than students who saw the animation without words (pictures only), heard the words without the animation (words only), or received no training (control). Results support a dual-coding hypothesis (Paivio, 1990) that posits two kinds of connections: representational connections between verbal stimuli and verbal representations and between visual stimuli and visual representations and referential connections between visual and verbal representations.

As predicted, the words-with-pictures group generated substantially more creative solutions on the problem-solving test than did the other groups. The groups also differed considerably in verbal recall. The words-with-pictures and words-only groups did not differ from each other and that both performed better than did the control group, Whereas the pictures-only group did not differ from any of the other groups.

48

1