Purdue News

June 1995

Expert battles 'couch-potato' response to educational videos

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- If this were an instructional video (zoom to close-up of a student walking across a campus) about desktop publishing and corporate newsletters (dissolve to chart that shows how many designers use Quark vs. PageMaker), it already would have been a miserable failure.

The unrelated images, the distracting camera work, and the complexity of the words and the information all interfere with the message. Most of the viewers would have lapsed into that comfortable -- but inattentive -- "couch potato" state of mind that takes over when they're watching TV.

That problem fascinates Katherine S. Cennamo (SIN-a-moe), assistant professor of instructional development in the School of Education at Purdue University and a former producer of instructional videos. She has devoted much of her professional and academic career to studying how to overcome the couch-potato syndrome, how to make instructional videos more instructive.

"The couch-potato response may be appropriate for TV as entertainment," she says, "but we have to get the learner to play a more important, more active part when we're using video for instruction. We have to overcome the viewer's expectation that television is a passive cognitive activity."

Her research has applications well outside the campus and the classroom -- for example, she says a 1993 survey found that 95 percent of business and industrial trainers used video to instruct employees. She says she suspects that few of the trainers know how to make the most effective use of the videos.

Cennamo published articles about video instruction last year in the Educational Technology Research and Development Journal and in Performance Improvement Quarterly. She has studied research in communications, educational psychology and education and conducted her own research to develop these suggestions for improving video instruction:

Tell the viewers that they're expected to learn from the video and outline exactly what they're supposed to learn. Include questions about those topics either in the video or by stopping the video to ask the questions at the appropriate spots.
Use simple videos. Learners will invest more mental effort and will learn more from simple videos. Complexity -- in words, syntax, zooms, movement or graphics -- causes them to pay more attention to making sense of the medium and less attention to the message.
Make sure there is a close correlation between what's being said and what's being seen. For example, a video about a surgical operation should show the operation while the narrator talks about it. If the video shows a patient being wheeled into the operating room while the narrator talks about the operation, the viewers learn less. Interestingly, viewers may learn more about the operation if the video and audio are totally unrelated (talking about the operation while showing pictures of landscapes) than if the video and audio are marginally related (talking about the operation while showing a patient being wheeled into the operating room).
Avoid complicated charts and graphs. They often require that the viewers take time to process the information, causing them to miss whatever comes next on the videotape. "The trainer should stop the tape, talk about the information and give the learners time to assimilate it," Cennamo says. "This way, the trainer can make a traditional video an interactive video."

The viewers, too, can make a video interactive. "Before the video begins, ask the instructor what you're supposed to learn from it and how that fits into other course content -- things you've learned in previous class sessions," she says. "And ask if you can interrupt the video presentation if you have questions or if something isn't clear. You might even ask the instructor to replay a particular segment, to give yourself another chance to absorb the material. Nobody's satisfied if you're just another couch potato."

Source: Katherine S. Cennamo, (765) 494-5675; Internet, cennamo@vm.cc.purdue.edu
Writer: Frank J. Koontz, (765) 494-2080; Internet, frank_koontz@purdue.edu
Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; e-mail, purduenews@purdue.edu

NOTE TO JOURNALISTS: Copies of the journal articles mentioned in this story are available from Frank Koontz, Purdue News Service, (317) 494-2080. To receive the text of this news release via e-mail, send an e-mail message with the text "send punews 9503ep1" to this address: almanac@ecn.purdue.edu. Purdue News Service also maintains a searchable data base of faculty experts and posts news releases, experts lists and story tips on a web server at https://www.purdue.edu/uns and a gopher server at newsgopher.uns.purdue.edu

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