Mental Effort

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Wetzel, C. Douglas, Radtke, Paul, H. and Stern, Hervey W. (1994) Instructional effectiveness of video media. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. USA.
Chapter 8: Learning, Mental Effort and the Perception of Media.

• The use of television for instruction has been greatly influenced by its parallel use for entertainment, recreation, and marketing. Although instructional/educational television has existed for as long as commercial television, it is commercial television that has set the basic standards and created popular expectations for the medium as a whole . P158
• A second set of concerns has focused on the intellectual skills, behaviours, and habits that long.term exposure to commercial television may create or encourage. Some concerns relate to the social impact of television, where learning is incidental to recreational viewing for entertainment. P158
• Idea: but how about Internet TV.?
• Commercial Television’s effect on learning from televised media: …a concerned has also been that the medium itself is limited as an instructional tool because students become habituated to respond to televised content without the conscious reflection or deeper processing needed for retention, transfer, and integration with other knowledge. P163
• Because television is primarily a visual medium, and can be understood at a superficial level with little mental effort, students may assume that it is easier to learn from television than from written or spoken material, and may exert less effort to learn from a televised presentation than from the latter media… Television is a nonserious or an easy medium because of its visual and realistic (rather than a verbal and didactic) format –are likely to result in students making less conscious effort to learn from television than they would from a more demanding medium. P163
• In addition, two different viewers may watch the same program for different reasons, focusing on particular characters, the plot, the setting or the technical quality of the programming. P164
• Student Attitudes Toward Television and Learning: Preference and Difficulty, preference and learning, difficulty and learning, gender differences, age differences. P165-166
• Student Attitude Toward Television, Mental Effort and Learning
• Attribution Theory: Attribution theory attempts to explain the tendency of persons to construct alternative explanations for their personal success or failure at a task. According to Weiner (1979), persons tend to attribute performance on a task to one of four reasons: luck, effort, difficulty of the task and ability. P168
• Schemata for Familiar Presentaion Forms
• D. R. Anderson and Lorch (1983) suggested that viewers monitor programs for samples of information that fall within their range of comprehension or that are superficial audio and video formal features of the medium. These samples of information serve to predict content of interest, which might then receive greater comprehension processing resources. P168-169
• Schemata are prototypical knowledge structures with sets of questions, or slots, which are answered or filled, by the information presented in the television program. If a program appears to match the pattern of existing schemata –if the presentation fills the slots with familiar answers –the viewer loses the incentive to attend to the program, and relies on existing schemata to understand the program. Thus, reduced attention and learning are possible consequences of encountering information from a medium such as television, whose familiar schemata have been overlearned. P169
• Idea: how about using a video index
• Idea: Piaget?
• Salomon proposed three constructs to account for the response of students to televised and print material: (a) Amount of Invested Mental Effort (AIME) that the viewer exerts to learn from a particular medium; (b) Perceived Demand Characteristic (PDC), which is the learner’s judgement about the relatie difficulty of a particular task or medium; and (c) Perceived Self-Efficacy (PSE), which is the learner’s sense of how well he or she can learn from a medium. P170
• The AIME for television is expected to be low for most learners.
• Salomon consistently found subjects to report that they exerted more mental (AIME) effort when reading than when watching television. P176
• In general, the negative effects of exposure to commercial television appear to be less pronounced than is popularly believed. P179
• Further Reading
• Baggaley, 1973, Analysing TV presentation techniques for educational effectiveness. Educational Broadcasting International, 6, 17-21.
• Cartwright, 1986. Training with video. White Plains, NY: Knowledge Industry Publications.
• Corbin and McIntyre, 1961. The development and application of a new method to test the relative effectiveness of specific visual production techniques for instructional TV: Urbana: University of Illinois Press
• Fuller, Kanaba. 1982. Single-camera video production Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
• Kozma 1991. Learning with media. Review of Educational Research, 61, 179.211
• Kraft (1986). The role of cutting in the evaluation and retention of film. Journal of Experimental Psychology:_ Learning, Memory and Cognition, 12, 155-162
• McCullagh, 1986. Model Status as a determinant of observational learning and performance. Journal of Sport Psychology, 8, 319-331.
• McGhee, 1980. Toward the integration of entertainment and educational functions of television. In P.H. Tannenbaum (Ed.) The entertainment functions of television (pp 183-208) Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Morris 1988. The use of television production techniques to facilitate the learning process: An experiment. International Journal of Instructional Media, 15, 244-256
• Nugent, Tripton and Brooks (1980). Task, learner, and presentation interactions in television production. Educational Communication and Technology Journal, 28, 30-38
• R. Williams, 1965. On the value of varying film shot on interest level. Speecj. Monographs, 35, 166-169.
• Salomon 1983. Television watching and mental effort: A social psychological view. In J. Bryant and D.R Anderson (Eds.) Children’s understanding of television (pp. 181-198)NY: Academic Press.
• Zettl, 1990. Sight, sound, motion: applied media aesthetics (2^nd ed.). Belmont, CA:Wadsworth.

Alberto Ramirez Martinell