Self-Regulated Strategies and Cognitive Styles in Multimedia Learning

An experiment was carried out to investigate how participants self-regulate their access to explanatory pictures that were designed to facilitate learning. Participants learned from two multimedia presentations, one in audio, and the other in video format. Participants were given the opportunity to ask for an explanatory picture when they felt they needed more information to better understand the text. Recording the requests for pictures assessed self-regulation of strategies that promote picture use. Before completing comprehension questions, participants explained why they asked for pictures and were asked to express their level of awareness of the cognitive processes involved in learning from pictures. Two questionnaires were administered to measure the right/left thinking styles and the spontaneous tendency to use mental images. Results showed that participants, without full awareness, self-regulated their cognitive strategies according to presentation complexity. Judgments of picture utility were internally coherent. Finally, cognitive styles played a minor role in self-regulating learning, but tended to influence the metacognitive awareness of the strategies applied.