Chute, A. G. (1978). An experimental study investigating the comparative effectiveness of a color and a monochrome version of an instructional film presentation on incidental and task-relevant discrimination learning. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Wisconsin at Madison.
(Summary, p. 103-106.) The purpose of the study was to determine the comparative effectiveness of color and monochrome versions of an instructional film on discrimination learning of fourth and fifth-grade students. It investigated the effects color and monochrome versions have on high and low spatial ability students' performance on a test administered immediately after viewing the film and on a delayed test administered two weeks afterwards. The test instruments employed verbal and non-verbal testing to measure students' incidental and task-relevant learning.
The study was designed to answer the following questions:
To investigate these questions, 116 fourth and fifth grade students from the largest elementary school in a rural midwestern county participated in the study. Since the study was conducted over a four week period, experimental mortality became a factor. Of the original 116 students, only 98 students participated in all three phases of the study. Eight of these students had to be deleted from the sample in order to achieve a balanced 2 x 2 x 3 factorial design. The balanced sample consisted of 90 subjects, 27 boys and 63 girls. Two Chi Square tests were performed to insure that the sex distributions were proportional in both the experimental conditions and in the SRA blocking factors. The Chi Square test of association indicated no significant differences for the sex distribution in the experimental conditions and in the SRA blcking factor (p < .05). Two test instruments were employed in the study. The SRA Space Relations test was used to measure the spatial ability of the students participating in the study. On the basis of the SRA test performance, students were assigned to the two experimental conditions using the yoked-pair random assignment method. The film test instrument had affective and cognitive items. The affective items asked students to express a preference for color or monochrome versions of film presentations. The cognitive items measured students' learning of incidental and task-relevant information presented in the film. The film was administered immediately after the students completed viewing the film, and then two weeks later, a modified version of the initial film test was administered. The experimental materials used for the treatments in this study were a color and a monochrome version of a 16 mm sound motion picture film. The film, titled «Creating whith Shapes», was produced in 1972 by Coronet Instructional Film. The objective of the 11-minute film was to teach students to identify basic shapes in man-made natural objects. The 2 x 2 x 3 factorial design was used to investigate differences among three factors, experimental group, grade, and spatial ability for subjects' performance on test instruments. The three-way analysis of variance was used for the stistical analysis of the data. Scheffe's method was employed to make three post-hoc comparisons where significant interactions occured. A t-test was used to determine the significance level of the subjects' preference for color. An several t-tests done to check for sex differences on subjects' performance scores. The findings of the study, briefly stated, revealed that: students learned more incidental information from the color motion picture film than from the monochrome version of the film; among students who viewed the color film, those with high spatial ability scored higher on task-relevant items on the delayed test, whereas among students who viewed the monochrome version of the film, those with low spatial ability scored higher; and the students prefered color versions of instructional films.