The Effect Of Decorative Pictures And Background Knowledge On The Elderly’s Performance In Multimedia Learning

With the introduction of "lifelong education",more and more senior citizens have advanced to the eldly university.The elderly universities in the new century generally teach with multimedia,which makes the eldly face the challenges of multimedia learning in re-education.According to the previous research,the combination of texts and pictures is better for learning performance in multi-media learning than texts alone.Therefore,educators often add some interesting irrelevant texts or pictures,resulting in the popularity of decorative materials(decorative texts and pictures)has become popular.Many researchers focus on the effect of decorative materials on multimedia learning,but the research conclusions are controversial.Whether the decorative pictures are positive or negative to the college students’ learning is still controversial.So further verification is needed.Much importance should be attached to the impact of the decorative pictures on the elderly who have been influenced by the aging self-awareness.Therefore,based on the results of previous researches and the cognitive theory of multimedia learning,this research aims at exploring the effects of decorative pictures and background knowledge on the elderly’s multimedia learning.There were two experiments in this thesis.In experiment I we employed a between-subjects design,2(age:the young vs.the elderly)x 2(decorative pictures:with vs.none),with the purpose of investigating the effect of decorative pictures on the young’s and the elderly’s performance in multimedia learning.The experimental results showed that the non-decorative-pictures group got better performance than the with-decorative-pictures group,regardless of their age.Based on experiment I,we employed a between-subjects design in experiment II,2(background knowledge:with vs.none)x 2(decorative pictures:with vs.none),with the purpose of investigating the effect of decorative pictures for the eldly’s performance with different background knowledge.The experimental results showed that the witih-background-knowledge group got better learning performance than the non-background-knowledge group.From the two experiments we got the following conclusions:(1)Whether there were decorative pictures or not,the learning perfomance of the old group was always worse than that of the young people.(2)Regardless of the age,the cognitive load of the with-decorative-picture group was always higher than that of the non-decorative-pictures group.(3)Regardless of the age,the learning perfomance of the with-decorative-picture group was always worse than that of the non-decorative-pictures group.(4)Regardless of the elderly’ s background knowledge,the coganitive load of with-decorative-picture group was higher than that of non-decorative-picture group;the learning perfomance of with-decorative-picture group was significantly higher than that of the relative non-decorative-picture group.(5)Regardless of the presence or absence of decorative pictures,the coganitive load of without-background-knowledge group was higher than that of the with-background-knowledge group;the learning performance of the elderly with-background-knowledge group was significantly better than that of the without-background-knowledge group.