Do media influence learning? The research reviewed in this article suggests that capabilities of a particular medium, in conjunction with methods that take advantage of these, interact with and influence the ways learners represent and process information, and may result in more or different learning when one medium is used compared to another, for certain learners and tasks.
This paper is in response to a challenge by Clark (1983) that,"...researchers refrain from producing additional studies exploring the relationship between media and learning unless a novel theory is suggested." (p. 457) He extended this challenge after reviewing the existing comparative research on media and concluding that, "...media do not influence learning under any conditions." Rather, "...media are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition." (p. 445) The theoretical framework supported by the current review presents an image of the learner actively collaborating with the medium to construct knowledge. It stands in vivid contrast to an image in which learning occurs as the result of instruction being "delivered" by some (or any) medium. The framework is meant to provide the novel approach required by Clark before research on media and learning can progress.
In this theoretical framework learning is viewed as an active, constructive process whereby the learner strategically manages the available cognitive resources to create new knowledge by extracting information from the environment and integrating it with information already stored in memory. This process is constrained by such cognitive factors as the duration and amount of information in short-term memory, the task-relevant information that is available in long-term memory, how this information is structured, the procedures that are activated to operate on it, and so on. Consequently, the process is sensitive to characteristics of the external environment, such as the availability of specific information at a given moment, the duration of that availability, the way in which it is structured, the ease with which it can be searched, and so on.