ABSTRACT
Instructional technologies have played a prominent role for decades in public and private discourse about education. Each technological advance from instructional radio through interactive digital video technology has generated a related debate about its use, effects, and costs for schools, teachers, students, and society (see Ehrmann, 1999, for a recent example). Over the years those debates have spurred hundreds of studies about technology’s educational impacts, many of which have been summarized in meta-analytic research studies (e.g., C.-L. C. Kulik, Kulik, & Cohen, 1980; J. Kulik, Kulik, & Cohen, 1979) and extensive literature reviews (e.g., Clark, 1983; Clark &
Salomon, 1986; Jamison, Suppes, & Wells, 1974; Kozma, 1991; Levie & Dickie, 1973; Mielke, 1968; Schramm, 1977; Wetzel, Radtke, & Stern, 1994). This chapter reviews theories and findings associated with classroom use of presentational media technologies, then applies those understandings and issues to a meta-analysis of experimental studies about desktop presentational programs’ (DPP) instructional effects. Studies of computer-aided instruction and distance learning technologies are meta-analyzed elsewhere in this volume (Allen, Bourhis, Mabry, Burrell, & Timmerman, chap. 14; Timmerman & Kruepke, chap. 6), and thus are not included in this chapter.
