In the past decades, teaching and learning has undergone rapid transformation partly because of advances in technology and access to such technology (Sung, Chang, and Liu, 2016). Mobile technologies (i.e. tablets, smartphones, and access to Internet) have become widespread, and is visible, even in the developing world (Aguayo, Cochrane, and Narayan , 2017). Mobile technologies allow for online learners to access learning resources on the go (McQuiggan, McQuiggan, Sabourin, and Kosturko, 2015). Instructional message design principles advance empirical tools aimed at producing lessons that allow for effective learning (Bishop, 2014). The purpose of this study was to develop a set of considerations for designing messages for mobile learning primarily through literature review and expert reviewers' feedback. The research methodology employed in the study is based on design and development research methodology (Richey and Klein, 2007). The study utilized Clark and Mayer's (2016) multimedia principles, Center for Universal Design's (1997) universal design for instruction (UDI) and mobile interface design best practices. Five expert reviewers with varied expertise in human computer interaction, special education, mobile learning, and instructional design were sought to review the considerations and provide feedback on its effectiveness for instructional message design. Overall the expert reviewers agreed that the considerations were effective and will be helpful to instructional designers, instructors of instructional design and content developers. They provided several helpful recommendations which were used to revise the considerations for designing content for mobile phones. / Ph. D. / In the past decades, teaching and learning has undergone rapid transformation partly because of advances in technology and access to such technology (Sung, Chang, & Liu, 2016). Mobile technologies (i.e. tablets, smartphones, and access to Internet) have become widespread, and is visible, even in the developing world (Aguayo, Cochrane, & Narayan, 2017). The Mobile technologies allow for online learners to access learning resources on the go (McQuiggan, McQuiggan, Sabourin, & Kosturko, 2015). Instructional message design principles advance empirical tools aimed at producing lessons that allow for effective learning (Bishop, 2014). The purpose of this study was to develop a set of considerations for designing messages for mobile learning primarily through literature review and expert reviewers’ feedback. The research methodology employed in the study is based on design and development research methodology (Richey & Klein, 2007). The study utilized Clark and Mayer’s (2016) multimedia principles, Center for Universal Design’s (1997) universal design for instruction (UDI) and mobile interface design best practices Five expert reviewers with varied expertise in human computer interaction, special education, mobile learning, and instructional design were sought to review the considerations and provide feedback on its effectiveness for instructional message design. Overall, the expert reviewers agreed that the considerations were effective and will be helpful to instructional designers, instructors of instructional design and content developers. They provided several helpful recommendations which were used to revise the considerations for designing content for mobile phones

An increasing number of students are learning in classrooms that employ electronic presentations designed in PowerPoint and other similar software programs. The design of the slides in such electronic presentations has an impact upon student learning, and ample recommendations are made within the literature as to specific strategies that serve as presumed best practices for the design of those slides that will best facilitate learning. While most of such recommended strategies are well supported by cognitive theory – they are considered to positively impact learning by contributing to decreased cognitive load, leveraged dual coding, and facilitated active processing, for example – many of them are not supported by empirical evidence that they do in fact enhance learning. Some of the recommended best practice strategies unsupported by empirical evidence include the use of progressive disclosure, dimming, and highlighting of text instead of full disclosure of text. Through the development and use of four separate electronic presentations, each of which was designed to employ one of these specific strategies (full disclosure, progressive disclosure, dimming, and highlighting), this study examined the impact of such strategies on student learning. The findings of this study indicate that significant differences are not evident in learning among the four different strategies. As such, this initial foray into the examination of the effectiveness of these four strategies indicates that any of the four strategies may be used with equal impact in the design of electronic presentations by instructors who want to help foster student learning. / Doctor of Philosophy / An increasing number of students are learning in classrooms that employ electronic presentations designed in PowerPoint and other similar software programs. The design of the slides in such electronic presentations has an impact upon student learning, and ample recommendations are made within the literature as to specific strategies that serve as presumed best practices for the design of those slides that will best facilitate learning. While most of such recommended strategies are well supported by cognitive theory, many of them are not supported by empirical evidence that they do in fact enhance learning. Some of the recommended best practice strategies unsupported by empirical evidence include the use of progressive disclosure, dimming, and highlighting of text instead of full disclosure of text. Through the development and use of four separate electronic presentations, each of which was designed to employ one of these specific strategies (full disclosure, progressive disclosure, dimming, and highlighting), this study examined the impact of such strategies on student learning. The findings of this study indicate that significant differences are not evident in learning among the four different strategies. As such, this initial foray into the examination of the effectiveness of these four strategies indicates that any of the four strategies may be used with equal impact in the design of electronic presentations by instructors who want to help foster student learning.

Novice Instructional Designers (IDs) often struggle to perform at the same level as experts. Specialized knowledge and experience are needed to discover the challenges and device appropriate solutions. Scaffold, guides, and heuristics can help novice when needing to perform tasks that require specialized knowledge. One common instructional design task requiring specialized knowledge is the development of instructional materials. Instructional message design (IMD) is a problem solving process to improve the quality of instructional materials through the application of research based principles. As this process is often not covered in novice IDs training, they will encounter more issues while attempting to address the challenges that come with creating instructional materials. Using a developmental study, a decision support tool was created to assist novice IDs with applying IMD, specifically the redundancy principle due to its ability to improve the communication within the materials. This study describes the operationalization of the principle, the design and development of the tool, expert review and revisions made based on their feedback, and the implications from the development of such a tool. / Doctor of Philosophy / Novices usually struggle to do tasks like experts. This is truer as the number of tasks and amount of specialized knowledge needed to do those tasks increases. Novices can perform these tasks if guides or tools are available. When creating courses, there are many tasks to accomplish like creating course materials. There are many rules to support the making of good, effective course materials. This study focused on designing and developing a tool to assist the novice when making course materials. The tool would help novices apply a rule to improve course materials so that students would have a better experience when using them.

This dissertation encourages adoption of a message-oriented receiver perspective when developing new instructional communication theories and proposes a causal-process model derived from Knowledge Acquisition Theory to demonstrate how this perspective can be used to predict student cognitive learning outcomes. Three hypotheses are generated to test the propositions of the derived model. The first hypothesis seeks to determine which dimensions of instructional message clarity and course content relevance best predict student interactions with instructional content. The second hypothesis predicts that student self-reported knowledge gains are a function of student interactions with content. The third hypothesis predicts that a significant proportion of the variance in knowledge gains can be explained by the combination of message characteristics with student content interactions both in and outside the classroom. A cross-sectional survey research design was used to collect responses from undergraduate students at a large southern public research university (n=333). The hypotheses were tested using linear and hierarchical regression and results demonstrated statistical support for all three hypotheses. The first hypothesis revealed the dimensions of instructional message clarity and course content relevance that significantly predicted student interactions with content inside and outside of class. Support for the second hypothesis illustrated that both in class and out of class content interactions significantly predicted student self-reports of knowledge gains. Finally, hypothesis 3 tested the comprehensive causalprocess model derived from Knowledge Acquisition Theory. The derived model received strong support and ultimately accounted for 65% of the variance in student perceptions of knowledge gains. Student perceptions of knowledge gains increased when students perceived textbook messages as clear, course goals and expectations as clear, content as relevant to their own lives, and when students enacted knowledge acquisition behaviors outside of class. Surprisingly, in class content interaction, presentation clarity, and procedural clarity dropped out of the model. Implications and limitations of the present study are discussed, directions for future research are suggested, and a persuasive argument is presented for why instructional communication researchers should continue to develop a message effects research agenda supporting the development of strong instructional communication theories that produce practical results to inform educational practices.

Obesity is an epidemic that causes physical, emotional, and financial tolls for both individuals and communities. The United States experienced a dramatic increase in obesity rate from 1990-2010 (Flegal, Carroll, Ogden, & Curtin, 2010), with more than one-third of adults and 17% of children in the United States now considered obese (Ogden, Carroll, Kit, & Flegal, 2012). Although most people agree obesity is a problem (Oliver & Lee, 2005), it is a disease with multiple causes (Wake & Reeves, 2012) and no straightforward solution (Phil & Heuer, 2009). Informed by theory and research on agency and attributions, the current study examined effects of explicit arguments and linguistic agency assignment on attributions of responsibility for obesity and support for public obesity policies. Participants (N = 211) were randomly assigned to read one of six versions of a health flyer defined by a 3 x 2 (Explicit Argument x Agency Assignment) factorial design and thereafter completed a questionnaire derived from previous research. Respondents across conditions agreed that obesity is a serious health threat, but differed in how they attributed responsibility for the illness. Those who read a message that consistently assigned agency to the disease (e.g., Obesity causes health problems) endorsed genetics as the cause to a greater degree than others who read a different version assigning agency to humans (e.g., Obese people develop health problems). In contrast, the human agency version prompted higher attributions of individual responsibility and greater support for upstream public policies aimed at reducing obesity (e.g., a snack tax on junk food, eliminating soft drinks from public schools, adding warning labels to foods with high sugar content). Results suggest explicit arguments are less effective in shifting perceptions of a stigmatized health threat than the implicit arguments created by linguistic agency assignment. The findings demonstrate specific message features that affect social attributions of illness (Heider, 1958; Weiner, 2006) and perceptions of responsibility for the onset and solution of health problems (Barry, Brescoll, Brownell, & Schlesigner, 2009; Niederdeppe, Shapiro, & Porticella, 2011). Theoretical implications, practical applications, and future research directions are discussed. / text

Augmented reality, defined as a real-time direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment that has been enhanced by adding digital computer generated information to it, is rapidly developing in terms of associated hardware (wearable displays, wireless mobile devices) and software (development platforms). AR enhanced instruction has been shown to provide cognitive and psychomotor support during procedural learning and has been shown to use both words and pictures when delivering instructional content.  A set of message design guidelines, created using a design and development research approach, can be used by novice designers to effectively manage the use of words and pictures while developing instructional applications for AR. / Ph. D.

Just nine months after the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 a global pandemic, the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization (EUA) for the Pfizer-BioNtech and Moderna vaccines in December 2020, followed by EUA for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in February 2021. Although achieving herd immunity through vaccinations is the greatest hope for ending the pandemic, the COVID-19 vaccination effort has been plagued by misinformation and mistrust. Given the urgency to vaccinate the population, public health officials must construct messages that encourage individuals to obtain the COVID-19 vaccine. The current study examines the impact of linguistic assignment of agency on an individual’s desire to get vaccinated. Guided by the EPPM, participants (N= 296) were randomly assigned to receive either a virus agentic message or a human agentic message. The researchers discovered that the virus agentic message resulted in a greater intention to obtain the vaccine. Further, participants who received the virus agentic message reported a stronger sense of perceived self-efficacy and perceived susceptibility. Additionally, participants who perceived the societal reaction to the pandemic to be appropriate, as well as those who knew at least one person who had died from the virus, were more likely to express an intention to get vaccinated.

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The purpose of this study was to examine whether cueing strategies embedded in computer delivered text messages affected the recall and comprehension of students who differed in their field dependent-independent cognitive style orientations. Two hundred thirty-eight undergraduate students of Virginia Tech participated the study, and 219 sets of valid data were used for the statistical analyses. All participants were given the Group Embedded Figures Test to determine their level of field dependence-independence. They were then randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups that varied in their use of cueing strategy. The first treatment group featured computer delivered text messages with color-highlighted-keywords, the second group featured the same textual content with color-highlighted-key-phrases, and the third group was a control group that featured the same content and employed no cueing strategy. Participants were administered two tests following the treatments, one that assessed knowledge of terminology and another that assessed comprehension. A 3 x 3 Analysis of Variance was conducted to explore the main effects for field dependency and cueing strategy and any interaction effect between the two factors. The results showed that field independents outperformed field dependents in all tests. There were no significant differences for the three treatments; the cueing strategies employed in this study had no effect on participants' learning. A significant interaction was seen between field dependency and cueing strategy. However, the results of a one-way ANOVA are unexpected: the cueing strategies employed did not improve field dependents' performance on the assessments and actually hindered the performance of field independents. / Ph. D.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether or not Public Service Announcements (PSAs) were an effective tool at modifying young adults’ perception of the r-word (the word “retard” or “retarded”). The PSAs included in this study were part of the Special Olympics’ “Spread the Word to End the Word” campaign. This study examined the efficacy of these PSAs by comparing three groups’ perception of the r-word: experimental group 1 who watched a PSA titled “It’s Not Acceptable” (PSA 1 group), experimental group 2 who watched a PSA titled “We Need a New R-word” (PSA 2 group), and a third control group who watched no PSA. The purpose of the control group was to gain a baseline of how today’s young adults perceived the r-word with no influence from PSAs. Six hundred and seventy-five participants were randomly assigned to one of the three groups. The two experimental groups watched their respective PSAs and completed the survey materials comprised of a consent form, their affective and cognitive responses to the PSA, their ratings of the r-word and their demographic information. The control group watched no PSA but completed the survey materials comprised of a consent form, their ratings of the r-word and their demographic information. This study then examined what the differences were between the three groups’ perception of the r-word. It was hypothesized that PSA 1 group would have a more negative perception of the r-word than PSA 2 group and the control group, due to PSA 1’s framing the r-word as similar to other minority slurs, and using affect to facilitate message acceptance. The PSA 1 group participants thought more about the argument within their PSA, and rated higher affective responses to their PSA, when compared to the PSA 2 group; however, PSA 1 group did not have a more negative perception of the r-word than the other two groups. Results found that the PSA 2 group perceived the r-word as significantly less respectful than the participants in the control group. These findings are discussed in terms of message design for future PSAs regarding the r-word