The Effect Of Representational Mode Of Information, Learner's Cognitive Style And Spatial Ability On The Learning In Multimedia Environment

Multimedia learning can synthesize diction information and non-diction information to a body, vividly and intuitively reflect course contents and have advantages of massive information, interacting each other and being used widely. However, what is regretted is that multimedia softwares often are designed in terms of the technologic function of multimedia in the realistic teaching, but not followed psychologic and pedagogic principles. Their learning effects deserve to be doubted, therefore they are also unable to guarantee to obtain the good learning effects. Moreover, even though their designs are rational, multimedia learning is uncertain to be efficacious to all learners and all knowledges, and the theoretical discussion are more in this aspect, the real experimental studies can not always be seen.The purpose of research is to explore representational mode of diction information, representational mode of pictorial information and some individual attributes how to influence the learning effect of learners, in order to offer experimental proofs to attain the best learning effect using multimedia learning.This research uses two experiments: first ,the declarative knowledge is used the study content, second, the procedural knowledge used the study content. In this two conditions, two experiments explore respectively the influence of informational representational modes (words, pictures +words, narrations, pictures +narrations, pictures +words + narrations) on the multimedia learning effect of learners with different cognitive style (field-independence, field-dependence) and different spatial ability (high, low). The results indicated :(1)In the multimedia environment, for the retention of declarative knowledge, the main effect of cognitive style is significant, the main effect of mode of information representation is not significant, the main effect of spatial ability is not significant. The cognitive style is very important factor influencing the learning of declarative knowledge in the multimedia environment.(2) Regarding the transfer of procedural knowledge, the main effect of representational mode of information is significant, the transfer effect of representational mode of words + pictures is the best, while the transfer effect of representational mode of narrations is the worst. The main effect of cognitive style is significant, the transfer effect of learner with field-independence is better, while, the main effect of spatial ability is significant, the transfer effect of learner with high spatial ability is better. The interacted effect of representational mode of information and cognitive style is significant, the interacted effect of representational mode of information and spatial ability is significant and the interacted effect of representational mode of information, cognitive style and spatial ability is significant. On the condition of the representational modes of words, pictures + narrations and pictures + narrations + words, the learning effect of learner with high spatial ability and field-independence is better, on the condition of the representational mode of pictures + words, the learning effect of learner with high spatial ability and field-dependence is better, while on the condition of the representational mode of narrations, the learning effect of learner with low spatial ability and field-independence is better. However, in retention test of procedural knowledge, the situation is inconsistent with transfer test, the main effect of spatial ability is not significant.This research has enriched the generative theory of multimedia learning. At the same time, the learning effect of different representational mode of information in multimedia environment is disagree to different learners with different cognitive style and spatial ability, which is discovered through the study on learners' cognitive style and the spatial ability. In other words, the multimedia learning also must be different from person to person, these offer instructions to design multimedia teaching software, fully display the latent advantages of multimedia technologies and applied multimedia teaching software in the teaching.