Personalization and pauses in speech: Children's learning performance via instructional videos

The popularity of instructional videos has increased in recent years. Instructors' speech acts as a social cue which plays an important role in children's learning from these videos. For example, an instructor's personalization style (personalized or non-personalized form) and pause types (pause or no pause) are potential design considerations which can support student learning within a multimedia environment. However, it is not yet well known how these factors influence children's attention allocation, learning performance, and academic emotion. The present study examined the effect of instructors' personalized forms and pause types on 28 six-year-old children in a laboratory setting. Eye tracking data revealed that the combined use of personalization and pauses in instructional videos best enhanced children's learning performance and attention allocation. However, there was no significant difference in between the four conditions. The study findings recommend that when creating instructional videos, instructors should speak in a personalized form and should incorporate regular transient pauses. The use of first-person language can also act as a social cue, enabling students' deep processing of the instructor's verbal information and increasing the instructor's social presence in the videos. This gives learners more time for cognitive processing, ultimately improving their learning performance.
Author(s): Jiumin Yang [sup.1] , Changcheng Wu [sup.2] [sup.3] , Caixia Liu [sup.1] , Yi Zhang [sup.1] , Zhongling Pi [sup.4] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.411407.7, 0000 0004 1760 2614, Faculty [...]