Speech Cueing on the Web by 'The Little Dude': Multimedia Instruction for Young Children

There is a real need for studies on learning from multimedia with school-age children, even pre-school children. In this research, temporal speech cueing was proposed to help young children as they listened to a speaking pedagogical agent direct their attention to details in on-screen text and graphics. An experiment was conducted with 4th and 5th graders (n = 133) who read on-screen text, and listened to cues presented by a pedagogical agent. Results showed that children in the speech cueing group out-performed those in the on-screen text group in immediate and delayed post-tests. Agent movement had no effect. Implications are discussed for helping young children to learn from the on-screen text presented in contemporary educational multimedia. DOI: 10.4018/ijopcd.2012070103 IGI GLOBAL PROOF 34 International Journal of Online Pedagogy and Course Design, 2(3), 33-45, July-September 2012 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. they spend much of their day in school, have not yet been streamlined by their abilities nor would they have to devote most of their class time to intensive curricular study (Case, 1985). Most beginning readers rely on context to read (Goldsmith-Phillips, 1989), showing a heavy reliance on contextual facilitation of word perception and are less adept at contextual facilitation of comprehension than children in the higher grades, in accordance with Stanovitch’s (1980) interactive-compensatory hypothesis.