The Icing on the Communication: Text or Video?

Abstract

Learning is lifelong, life-wide and life-deep (Tal & Dierking, 2014) and whilst science is everywhere, opportunities for scientific learning are missed every day. However, when it comes to learning, the learner must be intrinsically motivated and interested in the subject matter to result in information gain. The present thesis focuses on learning through the typical home activity of baking. Participants were randomly assigned a recipe for either chocolate brownies or chocolate chip cookies and the recipe was either displayed in a typical written format or a video format. Related science knowledge and concepts were incorporated throughout the recipes, explaining the ingredients and the baking process. A sample of 100 participants from a North American population were tested on recall of science facts presented within the recipes and answered 28 Likert-style questions to determine engagement with the given media format. The results indicated that following baking instructions from a science baking recipe in video format was beneficial to science knowledge gain. For engagement scores, however, the results revealed no significant effect of media format. These findings imply that video formatting of an instructional home activity may be more beneficial for science knowledge transfer than a written text format.