Personal response systems, such as clickers, have been widely used to improve the effectiveness of teaching in various classroom settings. Although hand-held clicker response systems have been the subject of multiple prior studies, few studies have focused on the use of cell phone-based personal response system (CPPRS) specifically. This study…

Clickers are used to improve student learning, motivation, and engagement. Smartphones can serve as clickers; however, instructional use of smartphones may lead to students multitasking between instructional and alternative media. This study investigates whether students are distracted after instructional use of smartphones in a lecture-based…

The construction of asynchronous learning environments often involves the creation of self-paced multimedia instructional episodes that provide the learner with control over the pacing of instruction (segmentation); however, does the amount of segmentation impact learning? This study explored the effects of the degree of segmentation on recall and…

Syllabus use in higher education instruction is ubiquitous, yet what actually constitutes a syllabus remains unclear. The authors assessed the contents of 1000 syllabi, sampled from the Internet, based on 26 criteria determined from a literature review of recommended syllabus components. Syllabi contents were assessed according to four categories:…

This article reports on the findings of a study designed to assess the utility of a multimedia tutorial intended to scaffold the development of historical source analysis through the use of the SCIM strategy. Seventy-seven undergraduate students (29 males, 48 females) with a mean age of 19.4 years engaged in a 2.5-hour tutorial across three…

In this study, we investigated the use of a web-based tool designed to influence levels of student self-efficacy by engaging participants in a time management strategy. On a daily basis for 16 days, a total of 64 undergraduate and graduate students engaged in the web-based time management tool in which students set goals regarding how they planned…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of training, modality, and redundancy on the participants' ability to apply and recall a historical inquiry strategy. An experimental research design was utilized with presentation mode as the independent variable and strategy application and strategy recall as the dependent variables. The…

The purpose of this research was to explore the effects that gender and institutional classification have on the inclusion of syllabus components. Course syllabi (N = 350) written by men and women from seven types of institutions, based on Carnegie classification, were sampled and evaluated for the presence of 26 syllabus components. The gender…

Distance education has become a major form of education in the United States. This surge in popularity has launched a plethora of scholarship emphasizing the distillation of those strategies which inform effective, learning experiences in the distance environment. A growing consensus among researchers recognizes the need for a holistic approach to…

The development of distance and distributed learning environments on college campuses has created a need to reconsider traditional approaches to teaching and learning by integrating research and theories in human learning, pedagogy, and instructional technology. Creating effective and efficient multimedia for Web-based instruction requires a…