Does the quality of digital teaching materials matter?: A comparative study of art students’ classroom behavior and learning outcomes

Abstract

Today, digital media facilities have already become a part of the standard classroom configuration. And therefore, digital teaching materials (DTMs in short) like Powerpoint or Keynote slides are widely used by teachers from different educational organizations all over the world. A common assumption is that DTMs of higher quality would help teachers to make their students more attentive in the classroom and would lead to more rewarding learning outcomes. However, a well-designed DTM usually means a considerable amount of time and/or money investment which really needs to be justified. Trying to answer whether the quality of DTMs does matter, an experiment was designed and carried out with art students from a university and a secondary vocational school in Shanghai. In the comparative experiment, they were divided randomly into several groups to learn abstract concepts of 3D animation with either high or low-quality DTMs. Data was collected and analyzed to see whether the quality of DTM led to significant differences in three aspects: affective, cognitive and behavioral. The results of the experiment revealed that high-quality DTMs surpassed low-quality ones in most cases, but the advantages over the low-quality DTMs were not as prominent as we expected. These findings suggested a second thought before making a decision on the investment of a fancy but expensive DTM.