Why the Cells Look Like That – The Influence of Learning With Emotional Design and Elaborative Interrogations

Abstract

We investigated emotional design features that may influence multimedia learning with a self-generated learning (SGL) activity, namely answering elaborative interrogations. We assumed that a positive emotional design would be associated with a higher motivation to accomplish the additional SGL activity. Moreover, an interaction was expected: Learners learning with a positive emotional design should profit from learning with elaborative interrogations whereas learners learning with a negative emotional design would not profit from this strategy to the same extent but would rather benefit through reading. Since no negative emotional design existed yet, we additionally took the challenge to construct one. In a preliminary study, the emotional design features were pre-tested for their influence on emotional state and according to evaluation results, emotional design features were modified for the final versions. For the main study, German students (N = 228) were randomly assigned to one of six conditions that resulted from a 3 × 2 Design with emotional design (intended-positive vs. intended-neutral vs. intended-negative) and SGL activity (elaborative interrogations vs. no elaborative interrogations). Contrary to expectations, the intended-negative design worked not out as intended, but was rather comparable with the positive emotional design with respect to learners’ emotional states. Learner motivation was higher when learning with the intended-negative emotional than the neutral design. The quality of the elaborated answers and learner motivation correlated positively with the performance of all learning outcome scores. For transfer questions which addressed the elaborated concepts, an interaction can be reported: learners learning with the positive emotional design benefitted from learning by reading compared to answering the elaborative interrogations. Regarding transfer questions whose concepts were explicitly described in the instructional material, it was better to learn with the intended-negative emotional than the neutral design. According to results of mediation analyses, the influence of motivation on learning outcomes could mostly be explained by the influence of motivation on answering the elaborative interrogations. Implications for creating emotional design as well as its effect on learning are discussed.

More Attractive or More Interactive? The Effects of Multi-Leveled Emotional Design on Middle School Students’ Multimedia Learning

“…Regarding the motivational outcome, no positive effect of visual emotional design on motivation was found in the present study (a lack support of H3), which was not consistent with some of the previous studies (e.g., Gong et al, 2017a;Navratil et al, 2018). It could be interpreted as the motivation decreasing function of the learning material itself (Knörzer et al, 2016;Stark et al, 2018a).…”

“…Emotional design was defined as the use of different design features with the goal of impacting learners' emotions as a way to enhance learning (Park et al, 2015b). One thing should be noted that emotional design is the design of the intrinsic learning content and should not impose additional information on the learning topic (Navratil et al, 2018).…”

Exploring EEG Effective Connectivity Network in Estimating Influence of Color on Emotion and Memory

“…According to color psychology, the feeling of people is stimulated by warm colors whereas cool colors induce a sense of relaxation and calming effect (Elliot and Maier, 2014). Besides that, color heightened motivation on the learner to continue learning from the materials as the color might be perceived as more vivid and interesting (Navratil et al, 2018). Our experiment shows that colored MLMs are able to induce positive emotion on participants while a similar finding was reported by Um et al (2007), Um et al (2012), Mayer and Estrella (2014), Le et al (2018), Münchow and Bannert (2018), Navratil et al (2018), and Uzun and Yıldırım (2018); which confirmed the effect of color on emotional experiences.…”

“…Besides that, color heightened motivation on the learner to continue learning from the materials as the color might be perceived as more vivid and interesting (Navratil et al, 2018). Our experiment shows that colored MLMs are able to induce positive emotion on participants while a similar finding was reported by Um et al (2007), Um et al (2012), Mayer and Estrella (2014), Le et al (2018), Münchow and Bannert (2018), Navratil et al (2018), and Uzun and Yıldırım (2018); which confirmed the effect of color on emotional experiences. Positive emotion strengthens motivation, attention and behavioral intentions that facilitate learning and enhance memory (Pekrun, 1992) as hypothesized by the Broaden-and-Build theory (Fredrickson, 1998).…”

Is Learning With Elaborative Interrogation Less Desirable When Learners Are Depleted?

“…Third, in our knowledge test we used open-ended questions, consisting of a free-recall test (retention) and a transfer test. However, there are surprisingly few studies concerning elaborative interrogation that assessed knowledge by means of open answer formats, and even fewer studies used measures of comprehension and transfer (e.g., McDaniel and Donnelly, 1996; Dornisch and Sperling, 2006; Dornisch et al, 2011; Roelle et al, 2015; Navratil et al, 2018). Overall, the results of these studies concerning the impact of elaborative interrogation on learning outcomes are not that positive, but rather mixed (for an overview see Dunlosky et al, 2013).…”