Speech Cueing on the Web by 'the Little Dude': Multimedia Instruction for Young Children

There is a real need for studies on learning from multimedia with school-age children, even pre-school children. In this research, temporal speech cueing was proposed to help young children as they listened to a speaking pedagogical agent direct their attention to details in on-screen text and graphics. An experiment was conducted with 4th and 5th graders (n = 133) who read on-screen text, and listened to cues presented by a pedagogical agent. Results showed that children in the speech cueing group out-performed those in the on-screen text group in immediate and delayed post-tests. Agent movement had no effect. Implications are discussed for helping young children to learn from the on-screen text presented in contemporary educational multimedia.