| ABSTRACT
This study investigated the effect of two different levels of student-content
interactivity on three levels of learner capabilities. Additionally, this study investigated
whether different levels of student-content interactivity promote learning at different
rates.
This study was a quantitative experimental research design consisting of an
objective pretest/posttest measuring Remember student learning achievements, six
lessons with assessments measuring Apply student learning achievements, and a
cumulative assessment measuring Create student learning achievements. The participants
were divided into two groups, the first exposed to learning objects with lower levels of
interactivity and the second to learning objects exhibiting very high levels of
interactivity.
The results of this experiment determined that there were no statistically
significant differences in students’ learning capabilities between the two levels of
interactivity. Additionally, the results for each of these experiments yielded very small
effect sizes. Therefore, the results indicated that higher levels of interactivity within an
online learning object (which typically cost much more to develop) had very little
influence on student assessment scores across the Remember, Apply, and Create levels of
the revised Bloom’s taxonomy.
This study did determine that there was a statistically significant difference in the
rate in which students were able to learn and apply the basic principles of web design and
development between the two modes of instruction. The results of this study indicated
xii
that it took the higher interactivity group of students an average of 5.52 hours longer to
complete the six lessons than it took the lower interactivity group of students.
The main implications of this research are that care should be taken by
practitioners when they are considering using high levels of student-content interactivity
in online learning objects. And because higher level interactivity features generally take
more time and effort to develop, this research showed that practitioners can use lower
levels of interactivity without adversely affecting student learning. Additionally, this
research showed that providing high levels of interactivity actually can reduce the
efficiency (as measured by the time to complete the lessons) of student learning. |