Effect of Subtitle Presentation Types on Students' Learning Outcome and Cognitive Load

Instructional video has been becoming an important learning resource in online courses. As its' common component, subtitles are usually shown at the bottom of each video. However, adding subtitles will consume a lot of time and greatly increase production costs. Providing brief-subtitle or no-subtitle could effectively improve this situation. Thus, its influence remains to be explored. Based on Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning and Cognitive Load Theory, through the teacher-fused instructional video on declarative knowledge, this paper set up three subtitle presentation types (no-subtitle, brief-subtitle, full-subtitle) to conduct comparison experiment. Participants watching instructional video in different subtitle presentation styles didn't exist significant difference in cognitive load. Moreover, in aspects of learning outcome, the no-subtitle group was strikingly better than two other groups. The experimental results showed that the subtitle might be not necessary in declarative knowledge instructional video.