The Relationship between Hypermedia Producers' Preferred Learning Styles and the Motivational Aspects of Their Productions

The Kolb Learning Style Inventory and the ARCS Evaluation Scale (ARCSES), which is based on Keller's ARCS Model for instructional motivation, were used to investigate relationships between the way people prefer to learn with the effectiveness with which producers of hypermedia incorporate motivational strategies in their productions. The results of two studies (the second a replication of the first) indicate that producers with certain preferred learning styles (accommodators) tend to be more effective at producing motivational interactive hypermedia whereas producers with other preferred styles (assimilators, divergers, and convergers) are not as effective. Introduction Librarians and information specialists are consistently teaching users and colleagues as part of their daily activities. The role of librarians and information specialists has increasingly shifted focus, from locating the information for users to teaching them how to find the information themselves. With the ever-changing technologies now used in information services, librarians and information specialists have to teach colleagues about innovations in the field. It is important that professionals in our field are cognizant of teaching, learning, and instructional theories and models so they can be more effective and efficient in providing others with the necessary concepts, principles and procedures to function well in the information society. Instructional design is concerned with understanding, improving, and applying methods of instruction. As a professional activity done by teachers and instructional developers, it is the process of deciding what methods of instruction are best for bringing about desired changes in student knowledge and skills in specific course content and a specific student population.1 Graduate students in three different sections of a course in instructional technology for library and information services participated in this study. All students involved in this study produced instructional materials using interactive hypermedia as part of the requirements for the course. In each section they were required to apply teaching, learning, and instructional theory principles to produce optimal instructional materials. The students in two of the sections were asked to evaluate the productions of the students in the first section, using an evaluation instrument designed for this study. Thus they received hands-on experience in data collection; a vivid, personal example of how theory may be applied to practice; and the opportunity to reflect on how their own cognitive styles will affect their teaching. The purpose of this research is to see if relationships between the way people prefer to learn has any relationship with the way producers of hypermedia incorporate motivational strategies in their productions. Kolb's Learning Style Inventory and Keller's ARCS Model were used in this investigation.2, 3 4, 5 Instructional Design Theory Reigeluth explains that there are two kinds of instructional design organizational strategies: micro strategies, which are "elemental methods for organizing the instruction on a single idea (i.e., a single concept, principle, etc.)," and macro strategies, which are "elemental methods for organizing those aspects of instruction that relate to more than one idea, such as sequencing, synthesizing, and summarizing (previewing and reviewing) the ideas that are taught."6 Subjects in the study were also introduced to the Component Display Theory (CDT), which deals only with micro-level strategies.7- 8 The CDT is concerned only with aspects of instruction that relate to teaching a single idea. Like most instructional design theories, it is made of models that are prescribed on the basis of goals or objectives. Objectives are classified on two dimensions in the CDT: type of content (facts, concepts, principles, and procedures) and the desired level of performance for the content (remember, use, or find). …