Partial Verbal Redundancy in Multimedia Presentations for Writing Strategy Instruction

Multimedia instructional materials require learners to select, organize, and integrate information across multiple modalities. To facilitate these comprehension processes, a variety of multimedia design principles have been proposed. This study further explores the redundancy principle by manipulating the degree of partial redundancy between written and narrated content. Ninety high school students learned about cohesion via animated lesson videos from the Writing Pal intelligent tutoring system. Videos were crafted such that narrated and onscreen written content overlapped by 10%, 26%, or 50%. Across conditions, students gained significantly in their knowledge of cohesion‐building strategies and the effects of cohesion on writing quality. However, degree of redundancy did not influence learning gains. Additionally, although more‐skilled readers outperformed less‐skilled readers, reading skill did not interact with the degree of redundancy. These results provide evidence that a broad range of partially redundant multimedia materials may be viable instructional tools that benefit diverse learners. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.