Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The use of video for instructional purposes has exploded online, but little is known about how people interact with video differently than other instructional materials and how much they learn from those lessons. Kintsch’s (1994) model of text comprehension provides a productive model for studying how students build a semantic representation of materials that unfold over time but have an overarching conceptual structure. The current study seeks to replicate an earlier finding from the text comprehension literature (Mannes & Kintsch, 1987) that providing students with an informational outline before reading text can improve recall of the text and/or transfer of ideas in the texts to new contexts, depending on the structural relationship of the outline to the text itself (consistent or inconsistent structure). This study was replicated using instructional videos rather than texts. Results will be discussed with respect to Mannes and Kintsch’s original study.