What is video good for? Examining how media and story genre interact

Abstract

Research suggests that the educational value of a media for- mat depends upon the ways in which its representational af- fordances interact with complex features of the learning en- vironment, including learner characteristics, content domains, pedagogical strategies, and cognitive and social processes. In the current study, we sought to understand some of these interactions by studying the impact of two different media (video and text) on learners within varied story types (which embody ideas of different content domains and instructional strategies). We studied how equivalent text and video ver- sions of four different stories impacted participants’: inter- est/engagement, affect/mood, emotional engagement, recall of information, ability to summarize main points, judgments of story quality, and opinions about content matter. Results indicate that while video does not provide an advantage over text on measures of immediate information recall, on other measures of the study there is a more complex interaction be- tween media format, story type, and video style. Explanations and implications of these findings are discussed.