23 Oct 96
David Frampton

Several of the most recent messages, from Lloyd Rieber [22 Oct 96], Tom Reeves [22 Oct 96], Ian Hart [23 Oct 96.a] and others, have redrawn the big picture in which this issue sits. Ian's mailing included a few lines on media which hit on a much less discussed aspect to which I have been giving some attention recently, when he commented that "Baggaley (1980) demonstrated that even subtle differences of camera angle can have profound effects on perception." Those "profound effects" have not, to my knowledge, been disputed. In their earlier work on the media/learning issue, Salomon and Clark (1977) highlighted what they termed "a seldom made distinction between research concerned with psychological effects and research concerned with instructional effectiveness." We can reasonably assume that by "instructional effectiveness" they meant "resulting in effective learning outcomes." Salomon and Clark thus drew a line in the sand between psychological effects and learning effects, but they did not express any particular surprise that one might expect the former to overlap, or align themselves, with the latter in certain circumstances of technological mediation. They observed: "studies that focus on the psychological effects of media are highly suggestive of hypotheses about the learning tasks for which the studied attributes [of the media] could be most effective." They also agreed that while the effects of media might not have been demonstrable up to that point through the research methods applied, there were certainly a variety of ways in which effects were "noticeable" (and such ways, presumably, have influenced the expectations of the researchers who have set out to use primarily hypothetico-deductive processes to identify them, even though some of their studies might well have joined the "no significant difference" list). Salomon and Clark concluded, in fact, that it is "quite self-evident" that different media attributes may have different psychological effects on different learners.

One of the reasons, I believe, why this debate will not go away, is that it has to remain intriguing--and obviously is to many--that media can have psychological effects but not learning ones. It is quite difficult, in my humble opinion, to conceive of other situations in which an environmental factor may have "noticeable" or even "profound" effects in the psychological domain (perceptual effects, for example) without influencing learning which occurs in that environment. It seems to me to be essentially a "gap" problem (i.e., why should a "gap" appear in a broad array of psychological effects attributable to technologies as mediators in an environment just in that space where learning is judged or expected to occur?). Another way of putting this (I do not recall the question being formulated in this way in the long and voluminous literature on this question, but I may easily have missed something) is to ask "If you accept Clark's position, what is it that shields or protects learning from media effects?"