The Impact of Decorative Images on Student Performance: A Two-Year Study of Online Library Modules

During a two-year period, over 1,900 undergraduate students completed a version of an online asynchronous library module either with or without decorative images. Two instruction librarians compared quiz scores and affective feedback from both versions to determine the impact decorative images had on student performance and analyzed the results through the lenses of multimedia and user experience studies. The study finds that decorative images have little impact on student performance and expounds on how these findings impact design concerns of future online library modules.