Another point of view is to examine the scores by using the total average, which is 10.639, therefore
approximating the border-line becomes 10.5 and the rest of the scores will be divided around this line. It is to be
noticed that the scores of the third group were not so high, but most of them were over the average and
comparing with the second group, shows that the results are close even if the third group took only the module
option while group two had both lecture and module learning. It also underlines how much the second group
improved their test results after taking the CBI and in the same time showing that the first group had not
improved much only with the lecture learning.
When a comparison is made in individual questions, an interesting phenomenon seems to take place. Students
who attended the lecture only, group 1, were better at the question “Using an example, explain briefly the stack
concept and its possible uses?” than students of group 3 who used the system only. This was with a significance
of p< .03.
Additional information was found by comparing student performance in similar questions in the pretest before
using the system and the post-test after using the system. An ANOVA test compared the grades of the same
students in both situations on a per question basis. Most of the difference or improvement came from the
questions: “Using an example, explain the stack concept and its possible use?”, “How could we implement a
stack in a program?” and “List the data variables and operations associated with the stack?”. The significance
was p< .000 in all three cases.
6. Discussion
Results seem to indicate a strong and positive interaction between animation and verbal representation with
effects in such a solid improvement in student levels. This provides strong support to the predictions made here
in that having the two modalities in parallel may have better results than having each on its own. The question at
which classroom only students did better was interested in showing how representation may imply a “limiting”
effect to imagination. When students are presented with exa mples that take some form, it becomes more
difficult for them to break out of the boundaries of that example and find another. Students who used the system
seemed to be directed towards how a stack functions rather than application areas and showed this in their
responses.
7. Experiment 2: Individual Differences between Subjects
Results clearly show that the multimedia system is capable of resulting in a significant degree of improvement in
student levels with respect to the concept of Data Structures. However, the assumptions of the interplay between
the two media, is so far only based on the degree of improvement, which is around 40%. There is no direct link
in the results to fortify the claim that this system is capable of improving student performance for students with
individual differences. Surely, if there is an interplay between the two media, then it should be just as effective
when used by students with more serialist bias as when used by students with a more holist bias. To further
support our claims that this system is capable of accounting for both types of students the following experiment
was conducted to identify students who belong to each of the above groups.
7.1. Subjects
15 students from the University of Bahrain, who are the members of group 2 in the first experiment.
7.2. Materials
The materials used here were the same as those used by Monaghan and Stenning (1998) represented in the
paper-folding test (PFT) as designed by French, Ekstrom & Price (1963). It is composed of two parts each with
a total of ten questions and students are given exactly 3 minutes per part.
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