Interactive videodisc instructional design: Effects of question location and cognitive style on retention and perceptions of high school biology students

The purpose of conducting this study was to investigate the effects of question location, as one consideration of Interactive Videodisc (IVD) instructional design, and student cognitive style on retention and perceptions of an IVD biology lesson. Three measuring instruments were used: Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT), Biome Achievement Test (BAT), and Student Perceptions on Instructional Material and Attitude questionnaire (SPIMA).;The GEFT was administered to 162 biology students at one private high school in Lincoln, Nebraska. Sixty-five field-dependent and 65 field-independent students volunteered to participate and studied a 40-minute IVD biology lesson in small groups of three. Two treatments, questions-at-end (QEND) and questions-interspersed (QINT), were randomly assigned to 130 subjects by group. BAT and SPIMA were administered one week after the IVD instruction.;Univariate analysis of variance was used to test the three null hypotheses and it was found that: (a) There was no interaction effect between question location and student cognitive style on retention and perceptions of students who studied the IVD biology lesson, (b) there was no difference of retention and perceptions between the QEND group and the QINT group of students, and (c) there was a significant main effect of cognitive style on students' retention of the IVD biology lesson. Field-independent subjects performed better on the BAT (M = 28.00 or 68.3%) than the field-dependent subjects (M = 24.08 or 58.7%).;Under the test conditions, student cognitive style is the only factor that affected retention of the IVD biology lesson. Question location seems to have no effect on student retention of the lesson content. Whether interspersing questions within the IVD biology lesson is a better design strategy than placing question at the end could not be determined by this study. Further research needs to involve more students from different schools and study the effect of question location on retention in different subject areas and, preferably, in actual classroom settings.