The effect of cognitive preferences and prior knowledge on web-mediated instruction

This paper reports the results of quasi-experimental research aimed at investigating the effects of prior knowledge and cognitive preferences on learning introductory programming concepts through web-mediated instruction. Participants in this study included 125 students classified as both novice and experienced learners. Each group received either text-plus-textual or text-plus-graphical web-mediated instructional formats. The results show that novice and experienced students learn differently from web-mediated instruction. Novice participants benefited more from the text-plus-textual format while more experienced participants preferred the text-plus-graphical format. This finding suggests that the design of effective web-mediated instruction should take into account the level of prior domain knowledge of the targeted users.