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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