Authors:

Ed Donaldson	ead@wam.umd.edu
Laura Shoemaker	lshoemak@wam.umd.edu
Job Slavin	jaslavin@wam.umd.edu
Jared Lake	jdfl@wam.umd.edu

Abstract

This study was designed to investigate the relative effectiveness of online instruction formats. Three instruction formats were used in the experiment, text-only, graphics-only and graphics with text.

In the experiment subjects were asked to build three different building block models. They built one model from the text-only instructions, one model from the graphics-only instructions, and one model from the graphics with text instructions. We measured the time it took them to complete the model in order to determine which instruction format was most effective, yielding the fastest times and the lowest number of errors.

The results showed there was a statistical difference in the times to completion of each model using the three different treatments. Further analysis showed that the greatest statistical difference was in fact between the graphics-only and text-only. There was no statistically significant difference between the graphics-only and text with graphics instructions. Surprisingly the analysis between the graphics with text and text-only instructions shows there is no statistically significant difference between their treatments.

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