Author(s)

Herner Saeverot¹, Glenn-Egil Torgersen²

¹Department of Education, Bergen University College, Bergen, Norway.
²Norwegian Defence University College, Bergen, Norway.

The main objective of this study was to investigate the importance of visual and verbal channel capacity for learning outcome from visual and verbal presentation forms. The study is based on a survey of 396 students at bachelor level (officers, student teachers and psychology students). The results show that there is a significant correlation between channel capacity and learning outcome from film and text, especially in the learning of details. Visual channel capacity has the greatest impact on learning details from text, while verbal channel capacity is most important for learning details from film. Furthermore, the results indicate that individuals with a high visual channel capacity have an advantage when learning context from film, while individuals with a high verbal channel capacity may have a benefit when learning contexts from text. While previous studies have concluded that some individuals have a higher verbal or visual capacity and thus learn better from either film or text (Paivio, 1986; Clark & Mayer, 2008), this study shows that the verbal or visual capacity specifically consists of various types of short term memory capacity differences. This applies primarily to the ability to process information presented successively (progressive capacity). The capacity for simultaneous presentation through several channels concurrently (multi-capacity), is also important for learning from both film and text, although multi-capacity seems to have had less impact than expected. The effect of divided attention (split-attention effect) may have compensated for the strain of the information processing. An estimated multimedia oriented compensation and proximity effect may also have had some significance when learning contexts, especially for individuals with low to medium channel capacity. In a pedagogical perspective the results indicate that teaching which included multimedia and separate text presentations should be organized according to the participants’ channel capacity and also to the content of the educational material.

Multi-Media Learning, Visual and Verbal Channel Capacity, Split-Attention Effect, Learning Outcome, Short Time Memory, STM, Working Memory

Saeverot, H. and Torgersen, G. (2016) Individual Differences in Visual and Verbal Channel Capacity and Learning Outcome from Film and Text. Creative Education, 7, 2845-2867. doi: 10.4236/ce.2016.718264.