THE EFFECT OF LEARNING STYLE ON DISORIENTATION IN THE PARALLEL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS
Dr. Hayriye Tugba Ozturk
University of Ankara
ABSTRACT
Delivering great deal of information on one screen via multimedia may
cause the users to leave the page, waste time and cognitive overload
if design factors were not taken into account. One of the unwanted
occasions in these environments is getting lost for the users.
In particular, the users whose reading habits based on reading printed
documents in a linear way may find it challenging to access the
knowledge which is acquired with links and buttons and which is
provided without a specific beginning and end unlike printed materials.
As a result, they may get lost. In that sense, in this research,
aforementioned multimedia environments were reviewed in the context
of design of multiple parallel environments and the effect of learning
style on disorientation was investigated. The independent variable of
this multiple group pre-test & post-test research was learning style
consisting of four different styles of learning. The participants’
learning styles were identified by Kolb's learning styles model
which is based on a four-stage learning cycle as diverging,
assimilating, converging and accommodating. All of the participants
were given instruction on parallel multimedia environments.
The dependent variables of this research were the status of
disorientation and disorientation scores. 59 participants used
software designed in accordance with parallel instruction. In order
to identify disorientation status Non-Linear Text Disorientation
Assessment which was formed by Beasley and Waugh (1995) was used.
One way variance analysis was used in order to analyse the data.
The results revealed that there was no effect of learning style
on disorientation status and disorientation scores in the parallel
multimedia environments.
KEYWORDS
Design of parallel instruction, Learning with multimedia, Learning style, Disorientation, Interface design, Windowing.
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