Emotional design in multimedia learning: Effects of shape and color on affect and learning
Introduction
How can the design of multimedia learning materials be used to foster positive emotions, and will such positive emotions facilitate learning? In particular, how do the colors and shapes used in multimedia learning environments impact affect and learning? These questions are of importance because we know that learners experience a broad variety of emotions in academic settings that are related to academic achievement (Pekrun, Goetz, Titz, & Perry, 2002), yet we are only beginning to understand which specific emotions are being experienced by learners, how these emotions affect key predictors of learning, such as students' metacognition or interest, and how students' emotions develop and are fostered through the learning environment (Pekrun, 2005). In this paper we are interested in emotional design, a term we use to describe visual design elements in multimedia learning environments that affect learners' emotions and foster learning (Um, Plass, Hayward, & Homer, 2011). The main goal of this study is to investigate whether an aesthetically appealing design of a multimedia learning material can induce positive emotions in learners, and whether positive emotions can affect cognitive outcomes (such as experienced cognitive load and learning outcomes), as well as affective outcomes (such as motivation, user satisfaction, perceived task difficulty, and perception about learning achievement). We are also interested whether design elements such as color and shape in a multimedia learning material individually induce positive emotions in learners, and how they affect cognitive as well as affective outcomes.
By addressing the role of emotion in the design of multimedia learning materials, educational psychologists can develop a more robust scientific theoretical foundation for learning with multimedia and provide better guidance to the designers of such environments. We begin this paper by briefly summarizing relevant issues of emotion and learning in general before we turn to specific studies that investigated emotion in the context of multimedia learning and present the theoretical foundation for this research, the Cognitive-Affective Theory of Learning with Media (Moreno, 2007).
Section snippets
Emotion and learning
Emotions are a result of an individual's judgment about the world and appraisal of interactions with and in the world (Desmet, 2002; Frijda, 1993; Oatley & Johnson-Laird, 1987; Ortony, Glore, & Collins, 1988). Emotions can be described along two dimensions that affect performance, valence (positive–negative) and activation (activating–deactivating) (Pekrun, 1992; Russell, 2003). For example, happy and hopeful are positive emotions that are activating, and satisfied and calm are positive
Research questions and hypotheses
In this paper we will present two follow-up studies to our initial work. Our first study sought to replicate the Um et al. (2011) results with a different population and different mood induction procedure, and examined individual emotions of learners by asking: Hypothesis 1 Does an aesthetically appealing design of a multimedia learning material induce positive emotions in learners? Based on the previous research reported above we hypothesize that the positive emotional design induces more positive emotions
Research questions and hypotheses
After establishing to what extent the effects we found for American undergraduate students were also found for German graduate students, Study 2 aimed to decompose the effects of the design elements color and shape by examining them in separate designs. In particular, we asked: Hypothesis 4 Do the design elements color and shape in a multimedia learning material individually induce positive emotions in learners? Based on the previous research reported above we hypothesize that the warm colors induce more
General discussion
The purpose of this research was to replicate and extend research on the emotional design of multimedia materials and the efficacy of emotional design to facilitate learning. The Um et al. (2011) study found initial evidence supporting a facilitation hypothesis for emotional design: The positive emotional design variant was able to induce positive emotions in learners and resulted in higher comprehension performance and higher transfer performance. The authors also found that learners using the
Acknowledgment
We would like to thank the German Science Foundation (DFG) for the support of this work through project DO 1237/3-1.
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