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

9.7. What We Don't Know About Segmenting and Pretraining

Research on segmenting and pretraining is not as well developed as research supporting other principles in this book, so we need a larger research base that examines whether the effects replicate with different materials, learners, and learning contexts. We do not yet know how large a segment should be, that is, we need to determine how much information should be in a bite-sized chunk. Should a segment last for ten seconds, thirty seconds, sixty seconds, or more? How do you determine where to break a continuous lesson into meaningful segments? The issue of how much learner control is optimal is examined in Chapter 13, but also is not a resolved issue. We also do not yet know how best to ...