e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning

9.6. Evidence for Providing Pretraining in Key Concepts

Suppose we asked some learners to watch a sixty-second narrated animation on how a car's braking system works (no pretraining condition), containing the script: "When the driver steps on a car's brake pedal, a piston moves forward in the master cylinder. The piston forces brake fluid out of the master cylinder, through the tubes to the wheel cylinders. In the wheel cylinders, the increase in fluid pressure makes a smaller set of pistons move. Those smaller pistons activate the brake shoes. When the brake shoes press against the drum, both the drum and the wheel stop or slow down." Figure 9.8 shows part of the animation that goes with this script. As you can see, this lesson is somewhat ...