Page 32 - The Inquiry into the Development and Implementation of a Multimedia Resource to Help Improve Parental Involvement in Their Child’s Reading Literacy During the Primary School Years.

Figure 2.3 Dale’s Cone of Experience

Dale theorised that learners retain more information by what they ‘do’ as opposed to

what is ‘heard’, ‘read’ or ‘observed’. This ‘learning by doing’ has become known as

‘experiential learning’ or ‘action learning’. When parents watch an instructional
video and then apply what they have learned by putting the learned strategies into

practice, they are ‘learning by doing’. It enables them to acquire a range of
transferable skills in addition to helping enhance their child’s reading.

When designing an instructional digital video, the primary consideration is the
cognitive load. The Cognitive Load (Figure 2.4) Theory was developed by Sweller

and colleagues in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Sweller, 1994). Sweller proposes

that memory has several different components. He discusses sensory memory as the
shortest-term element of memory. The original term ‘short term memory’ has since

been replaced by ‘working memory’ to emphasise that this component of memory is
responsible for the processing of information (de Jong, 2010). It is the ability to

retain impressions of sensory information from the surrounding environment after
the original stimuli have ended. The viewer will temporarily store, process and select

what information they wish to pay attention to during the learning process, due to its

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