The following information has been derived from proposal for funding, (1995).
The use of interactive media in schools is accelerating. More than 90% of secondary schools have at least one CD-ROM player, and the use of other interactive media, such as CDi, is also growing (National Council for Educational Technology estimates from 1994). Over the next few years we can expect accelerated growth in the commercial provision of multiemedia materials for the home education market, in direct competition with UK educational materials.
With such rapidly expanding interest, it is important to develop a clear understanding of how these media work in the context of education. It is the aim of this study to pursue that understanding.
We have recently completed a large-scale evaluation study of interactive media in the classroom, which was commissioned by the Department for Education. The study encompassed more than 200 schools in England and Wales. A summary of the findings has been sent to all primary and secondary schools, and the full report is available to all educational institutions (Laurillard et al, 1994).
One of the clear findings from this study was that although teachers are generally satisfied with the hardware of these technologies, they are very disappointed with the design of the software. Children were frequently unable to make sense of the programs without considerable teacher preparation or supervision, and their work on multimedia sometimes remained fragmented, and poorly understood. Moreover the interactional style of some sequences led to non-reflective processing in comparison with off-line work on the same problem (Laurillard and Taylor, 1994). These findings are compatible with other research projects which show that the narrative structure of multimedia programs, or sometimes the lack of it, affects learners' comprehension, often adversely (Plowman, 1991; Stratfold, 1994).
Designers of interactive media are in a difficult position, as there is a singular lack of theory from which design decisions can be made. If the field is to progress, a theoretical account of the impact of detailed design features on learner behaviour must be articulated as clearly as possible. This study proposes to develop a theoretical understanding of the forms and functions of narrative in interactive media, which is based on empirical research, and is capable of informing instructional design.
The importance of focusing on a feature such as 'narrative structure' for educational media has been demonstrated throughout a range of research studies on learning through reading, through television, and through discussion.
Children have a well developed sense of a concept of narrative from years of exposure to its various forms. Their experience with the particular schematic structure of stories leads to the development of "specifiable sets of cognitive operations controlling both comprehension and memory" (Mandler and DeForest, 1979). Their concepts of narrative are so fundamental to comprehension that if a text does not conform to expectations which have been aroused by exposure to what they take to be a narrative text there is likely to be some degree of cognitive disturbance. Meek (1988) describes 'how texts teach what readers learn' in terms of the processes by which young children learn to read by interacting with stories. She emphasises the key role of narrative in offering structure and cues.
Cognitive science research suggests that texts which are unfamiliarly structured make excessive demands on the learner's cognitive processes, and that memory and comprehension can be used most productively when the text is clearly structured and navigable (e.g. Kintsch & Greene, 1978). Learners have schemata which have been derived from exposure to conventional narratives and are constantly adjusting their understanding in accordance with these, making the construction of `story' a central cognitive goal.
Recent research into `television literacy' suggests that children are not passive viewers, but are constantly processing, interpreting, and evaluating what they watch. The type of talk engaged in by group users at decision points also has an impact on the narrative. If the talk is mainly procedural or operational it is more likely to disturb the narrative than if the task is integral to the narrative, and is concerned with the domain. In our empirical studies, we will focus on the types of talk learners engage in whilst using the program because talk generated within the group offers a non-invasive source of data which illuminates learning processes as social, situated activities.
Evidence from instructional science research shows that learners need help in discerning discourse structure in order to maintain meaning, and thereby understand what they are being taught. This has been replicated in several studies of the traditional teaching media (see Laurillard 1993).
All these studies emphasise the clear link between narrative structure and comprehension for educational media. But what does this mean for the apparently non-narrative interactive multimedia? Our understanding of literacy and visual literacy has been destabilised by the new interactive media which confront users with the need to integrate simultaneously a range of symbolic modes. Although the need to understand a `new literacy' is widely held (eg Hodges & Sasnett, 1993) there has been little investigation of what this may encompass. This research will consider the concept of `interactive media literacy', and the ways in which program design may be able to both facilitate it and draw upon it.
For interactive media, unlike traditional media, one of the key benefits is seen as being the lack of imposed structure, giving much greater freedom of control to the user. However, in the context of instruction, this benefit runs counter to the learner's need to discern structure if there is a message to be understood. We have found from observation that learners working on interactive media with no clear narrative structure display learning behaviour that is generally unfocused and inconclusive. Only when teachers prepare instructional worksheets, or offer supervision, thus imposing some form of organising structure, is learners' work likely to be productive (Plowman, 1991; Laurillard et al, 1994). Thus one of the key benefits of interactive media, the greater learner control it offers, becomes pedagogically disadvantageous if it results in mere absence of structure.
Narrative structure is one of the most important ways in which the instructional message comes to be understood, and we have to learn how to manage a medium that undermines its power if it is to succeed in the educational context. The structure of interactive media differs from those of other media with which we have more familiarity because (a) the media formats switch frequently between video, text, animation, graphics, sound, silence, and (b) the learner can be given control over all aspects of pace, sequence, choice of activity, and input to the system being modelled.
We need a clear methodology to describe the phenomena of interactive media literacy that is capable of capturing all these aspects. Plowman (1991) developed a technique for recording learner behaviour in the context of interactive media, called 'media interaction charts' (MICs). Using this technique, she was able to demonstrate that the experience of using interactive media is extremely fragmented, particularly in the frequent transitions from video material to text or computer-generated graphics. These methods of capturing and analysing learning events and learner talk form a valuable basis for an account of the effects of interactive media design.
Many designers of educational multimedia choose to embed task-oriented sequences within a 'plot' but, as with television documentaries, there is a tension between the different elements of myth and rhetoric (Silverstone, 1986). The story elements (myth) tend to be faster-paced because action is fundamental to developing the story; the pedagogical elements (rhetoric) are slower because they are more concerned with exposition. For educational multimedia, as for documentaries, the notion of 'narrative' must be interpreted as incorporating both the story component, oriented towards visualisation and embedded in video sequences, and the pedagogical component, oriented towards telling and asking and embedded in text screens and voice-over. However, the advantages of interactive multimedia - learner control, non-linear format, multiple media, frequent transitions between media - all contribute to disruption of the narrative. In these early stages in the evolution of interactive media, narrative is undeveloped and non-linear (Plowman, 1994a), and a process of linearisation could be central to increasing our ability to navigate and comprehend interactive media (Don, 1990; Plowman, 1994b). On the other hand, the loss of linear structure is welcomed by some theorists (e.g. Bolter, 1991), who maintain that the associative structures of interactive media and hypertext more closely model our cognitive processes, implying that the non-linearity of interactive media should be preserved. The proposed research seeks to provide an empirical basis for resolving these speculative and contradictory assertions, and for understanding how narrative and non-narrative structures function in interactive media, and to what extent the various forms help learners understand the material.
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