Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Experimental And Standard Formats For Procedural Instruction: Evaluation Of Merging Pictorials And Words, Anne M. Polino

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

Three methods of training procedural tasks were studied. Forty-five high aptitude and fourth-five low aptitude Naval trainees from the Basic Electronics and Electricity School, Orlando, Florida, were given training with either a programmed instruction text with a pictorial-print information presentation format, or a standard narrative text. The effects of instructional method and aptitude on the performance of a procedural task after 1 1/2 hours of study and after on week's time were evaluated. It was shown that subjects who studied the programmed instruction text with the pictorial-print information presentation format made significantly (p<.0001) fewer performance errors, immediately after study and after one week, than did the subjects who studied the other methods. It was also shown that high aptitude subjects performed significantly (p<.0001) better than low aptitude subjects, regardless of training method. However, it was found that the low aptitude subjects who studied the programmed instruction text with the pictorial-print information presentation format performed significantly (p < 0.1) better than the low aptitude subjects who studied the other materials. These low aptitude subjects who studied the other materials. These low aptitude subjects also performed significantly (p < .01) better than the high aptitude subjects who studied the standard narrative text.