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Introduction
The Internet is beginning to reshape the patterns of daily life. Its powerful appeal is
evidenced by a reduction, for the first time ever, in television use by Americans (UCLA Center
for Communication Policy, 2001). For several hours a week, many people are trading their
television screen for a computer screen. What are the implications of such a change? This
research will explore that question. Specifically, I use an experimental design to test the effect of
interactivity on learning from Web-based news stories.
Learning from media is a topic at the intersection of two fields: communications and
education. Researchers in both fields have explored the impact of communication technologies
on learning but have often reached different conclusions. The second purpose of this research,
then, is to examine why this might be.
Media Research in Two Fields: Contradictory Results
That people often learn something from media is uncontroversial. Media effects
researchers take as a given that media use has some consequence on at least some consumers.
Scholarly questions, then, tend to focus on which individuals are affected the most, under what
conditions, and with what result. Many researchers, pursuing Marshall McLuhan’s untested
hypothesis (1964) that media channels have more influence than the content they carry, have
compared the influence of various communication media.
Research in this area has not been limited to communication scholars. Education
researchers have been working in the same area, with the goal of improving classroom learning.
A quick summary of results of studies for both fields appears in Table 1 below.
[Table 1 about here]
Convention