The Effect Of Media On Student Modalities

The effect of Media on Student Modalities

About 90% of all incoming information to the brain comes through the senses. Add to that the fact that over 82% of the learners in the classroom prefer to learn by visual and tactile means, and you have a recipe for failure if the primary methods of teaching are auditory. The television is not interactive, and this generation prefers to be active participants in all that they do. Tapscott cited a 1997 survey by Teenage Research Unlimited, in which 80% of the teenagers polled said it is “in” to be online—right up there with dating and partying.

The effect of Media on Motivation

According to Jensen (1997), interactive abstract learning that includes the use of various media, such as CD-ROMs, the Internet, distance learning, or virtual reality, utilizes the categorical memory and requires little intrinsic motivation. Although traditional forms of education receive the greatest amount of the education dollars, they require a great deal of intrinsic motivation to be effective. Students must struggle to make the traditional type of learning work, since it is outside the context of its meaning. In addition, students from inner-city poverty learn in context—usually from stories—and to require them to learn all day in an environment that is not brain friendly for them helps to set them up for failure. Similarly, English language learners need visual stimulus to help them to process and store the information that comes from words. They often