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Running head: LEARNING STYLE ON SHORT-TERM MEMORY

Which Learning Style Has a Greater Effect on Short-Term Memory?

Audio Versus Visual Presentation of Words

Sarah K. Arboleda and Jaclyn E. Reagan

Longwood University

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LEARNING STYLE ON SHORT-TERM MEMORY

Abstract

Traditional and online classes differ in many ways, especially the presentation of the material

that is to be studied. We wanted to explore which would be more sufficient, so we conducted an

experiment in which participants studied a word list either visually or had the words read aloud

to them. We measured the number of words that were correctly memorized. Participants were

provided with a word list, and once they were presented with the words, they had two minutes to

circle all of the words that they could remember. The participants that visually studied the words

correctly memorized more words than the group that heard the words read aloud.

Keywords: visual, auditory, memorization, word list

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Which Learning Style Has A Greater Effect on Short-Term Memory?

Audio Versus Visual Presentation of Words

Many people, such as students from grade school to college and even adults, struggle

with discovering the most effective way of preserving information. Everyone has different

learning style preferences because one style does not cater to the specific needs of diverse

student learners. There is a wide range of learning styles: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, logical,

social, solitary, and verbal; however, we were specifically interested in visual and auditory

stimuli, which are two of the most common styles. The way that we tested the two was by

determining which had a greater effect on short-term memory, which is defined as retaining

information for roughly twenty seconds.

We conducted our research with the intent to compare learning styles from two different

perspectives. These include online classes, which consist of reading PowerPoints and textbooks.

As well as traditional classes, in which students are taking in information by hearing a lecture

provided by the professor in a physical classroom. In the article by Stack (2015), researchers

studied participants that took an online course versus a traditional course. They found that there

was no significant difference between the exam scores.

Prior to our study, the majority of studies have shown that visual and audio stimuli

combined is better than when they are presented separately. Research piloted by Pezdek and

Stevens (1984) showed that even at a young age, the arrangement of visual and auditory stimuli

is stronger than auditory alone. Also supporting the combination of these stimuli, it was

concluded that when words are presented alone, they are not as easily recognized when presented

with another stimuli (Glaser & Schwan 2015).

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To support having an auditory group, the article by Gonsalves & Paller (2000) referred

specifically to two different types of auditory presentation. Later, participants were directed to

recognize the spoken words. In contrast, in past studies there have not been showing an ample

amount of research conducted to demonstrate adequate support for audition as a whole.

Carlesimo’s study (2014) served as a model for how word lists were traditionally

displayed. This study consisted of a list of words with a number of columns that were parallel

from one another. The focus of this study was on declarative memory. The age range in this

study varied from 20-year-olds to 80-year-olds, and their educational level also varied. The

participants received three different words lists that contained unrelated, concrete words. These

words also varied in length, being four to ten letters long. After participants were provided with

instruction, the researcher read the list of words with approximately two seconds between each

word. Then, the participants recalled the words they remembered, and the words that were

remembered in the correct order were the ones that were recorded.

Additionally, in the study conducted by Avons, Ward,& Melling (2004) the participants

were instructed to recall the list of words in the exact order that they were presented. The

interest of the researchers in this study was to see if the words at the beginning of the list would

be more correctly memorized than the words in the middle or toward the end of the list, but

results showed that was not necessarily what occurs. Basing knowledge off of these results, the

order of the presentation of words may be irrelevant.

In another study, the word list contained various lengths of words (Coltheart, Mondy,

Dux, & Sephenson 2004). In this study, there were a variety of words with a different amount of

letters in each word. Not only did they manipulate the word length, but the researchers also

manipulated the rate at which the words were presented. Also, the researchers made a conscious

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effort to have a variety in the number of syllables in the words. They defined the short words as

being four letters long, and the long words were described as six letters long. It was found that

recognizing longer words was significantly more difficult than words with a smaller amount of

letters. Also, the larger amount of syllables that occurred made it more difficult for the

participant to remember it. Additionally, the faster the words were presented, the less time the

participants had to process that word until the next one was given. This led to there being

significantly fewer words remembered when the words were presented more quickly.

We hypothesized that the visual stimulus group would perform better on a recognition

test than the auditory group. It is suggested that suggested that later recognizing words would be

more successful if tested the same way that material was presented (Pilotti, Gallo, & Roediger

2000). Pilotti and colleagues’ results were more successful pertaining to word identification

when the physical attributes of the study were correlated with test stimuli.

We predicted that students that took online classes would be more likely to perform better

than students in traditional classes on graded tests and quizzes. This is due to studying their

PowerPoints and notes visually rather than obtaining an abundant amount of information through

lecture. Research conducted by Stack (2015) showed that there was no significant difference in

exam scores between online and traditional classes. We made many alterations to past research

studies that we used as guidelines for producing our own study. For example, Pezdek and

Stevens (1984) conducted a study that supported the combination of visual and auditory stimuli,

but much like other studies, there was no indication of which stimulus would be most productive

alone.

Studies also included a specific order of words that had to be remembered, but in our

study, we wanted to study the memorization of the words in any order. Our word list also varied

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in numerous ways from past research in that it had words that all contained six letters. The list

was not specific to concrete or abstract words; they were all randomly selected based on length.

The participants did have approximately two seconds to retain each word due to the time length

that they were given to visually study the words, and also the time that the researcher took

between each word while reading the word list.

Method

Participants

Longwood University is a liberal arts school with students of all majors, which is where

participants were incorporated. The total number of students that participated was 120. They

ranged from ages 18-33 with a mean age of 19. Seventy-five percent of the participants were

female, while the other 15% consisted of male or another category of sex. In terms of class rank,

30% were freshman and the rest were distributed nearly even between sophomores, juniors,

seniors, or not specified. Freshmen students’ participation was due to the fact they received extra

credit in an introduction to psychology class that they were enrolled in. Other participants that

did not receive extra credit were strictly volunteers. Each of them enrolled for this study through

convenience sampling on an online sign-up service called Sona Systems.

Materials and Procedure

Participants entered an assigned classroom located on Longwood University’s campus

and sat at a table where they saw sheets of paper face down. First, the participants were informed

of the study that they were about to participate in. Next, participants were given the opportunity

to see a hard copy of the consent form that they signed electronically through Sona Systems

when signing up for the study. The experiment is a between groups design, therefore one group

of participants visually studied a list of words and then were tested on their short-term memory.

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Meanwhile, the second group of participants retained the same list of words after hearing them

read aloud in the same order that the visual group saw them.

When the experiment began, participants in the visual stimulus group had a sheet of

paper that contained the word list that they were to memorize and the bottom sheet, which was

the scrambled list of the same words with others added to it. Participants in this group had 50 s

to view the list on the first sheet of paper that contains 25, six-letter words that were randomly

selected from the dictionary (see Appendix A). Once the participants’ 50 s to view the words was

over, they were directed to turn the first sheet face down again and flip over the second sheet of

paper. That paper has additional six-letter, randomly selected words surrounding the words that

were on the first sheet where participants were instructed to circle all words that they can

correctly remember (see Appendix B). Participants were only allowed a maximum of two full

minutes to circle their choice of words. If they did not finish within the two minutes, they were

still asked to flip over the paper to end the study.

Separately, the second group of participants had only one sheet of paper on their table.

That group was in the auditory stimulus group and listened to the same list of words that the

visual stimulus group studied. The list was read out loud in the same order with a separation of

two seconds between each word. This gives participants in both groups the same amount of time

to retain the information. After the list of words has been read aloud to them, they flipped over

the same second sheet of paper as the visual stimulus group and were directed to circle all of the

words that they could remember (see Appendix B). The auditory group will also have the same

two-minute maximum to circle their choice of words and turn their paper over when they had

completed it.

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To end the study for each of the two groups, all of the participants were given a

debriefing statement to explain the intentions and the purpose of the study. Also they were

informed of which level within the study they participated in. When participants conclude the

study, we asked that information regarding the procedure or any other confidential information

be not disclosed due to the true nature of the research. As the study and data collection finished,

participants were informed of the time, date, and place of the poster session where the final

results were presented. We compared the short-term memory between auditory and visual

stimuli. We measured it by counting the number of correctly circled words for both groups.

Lastly, participants will be thanked for their participation in the study.

Results

An independent t test showed that the participants who listened to a list of words read

verbally, correctly remembered less words (M = 15.89, SD = 3.606) than the group that studied

the words visually (M = 18.91, SD = 3.387). There was a significant difference between the two

groups’ ability to correctly remember the words studied, t(118) = 4.720, p < .001, d = .25, 95%

CI[1.755, 4.292] (two-tailed). Reference Figure 1 for a graphical representation of the results

between auditory and visual stimuli. There was also an approaching significance between the

word memorization of females and males, t(118) = 1.839, p = .068. The females, (M = 17.67,

SD = 3.832) memorized more words than the males, (M = 16.18, SD = 3.539). See Figure 2 for

the display of these findings.

Discussion

In the current study, we tested word capacity on short-term memory. Our rationale was

based on traditional versus online classes. The group who studied the words visually correctly

remembered more words than the auditory group. One reoccurring issue in the group that

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listened to the words read aloud was that participants closed their eyes in an attempt to visualize

the words as the researcher read the words aloud. In addition, one participant began writing the

words on the back of the paper. Both of these issues supported that for some of the participants

there was a strong preference for visual learning rather than auditory.

As displayed in our results, visually learning information is more successful than strictly

auditory presentation. These results support research that goes along with our rationale in which

studying textbooks and presentations online leads to remembering a greater amount of

information than simply hearing professors state information one time.

A prior study done by Pilotti, Gallo, and Roediger (2000) showed that visual presentation

is a more solid way of remembering information. Their study was similar to ours because

participants viewed a set of words visually and had to later retain the information they had

learned. Since there are more studies on combined auditory and visual stimuli, this study was

part of studying the two conditions separately.

Most studies do not support the differences between male and female memory. Therefore,

we did not use sex as an independent variable. Our results were interesting to find that we had an

approaching significance for sex difference. Females were closest to our alpha level, where

males were not far behind. Even though there was quite a difference in the number of female and

male participants, it was shocking to find such a close significance. This may be a result of the

lack of males at Longwood University. Another explanation would be that females are typically

strong in the area of language and comprehension, than males are.

In future research, it would be beneficial to add one more condition where both auditory

and visual stimuli were combined. In past research by Glaser and Schwan (2015), they studied

only combined stimuli. However, adding this to future research will add more validity by

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knowing the study would test what it is supposed to, and easier ways to compare all conditions.

This would give a stronger comparison on whether one way of learning is stronger by itself or

together. Another recommended change would be to include a dependent variable of the

percentage of words circled correctly, out of the total number of words circled by the participant.

This way circling incorrect words will penalize their percentage correct.

Our research shows that in a situation in which you have to remember information, it is

best to use a visual approach. If material is being displayed through audition alone, we suggest

visualizing as much of the information as possible, much like the participants did in our study.

This suggests that information is better retained from online classes where students will be

learning the information visually.

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References

Avons, S., Ward, G., & Melling, L. (2004). Item and order memory for novel visual patterns

assessed by two-choice recognition. Quarterly Journal Of Experimental Psychology:

Section A, 57(5), 865-891. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02724980343000521

Carlesimo, G. L. (2014). Normative data for measuring performance change on parallel forms of

a 15-word list recall test. Neurological Sciences, 35(5), 663-668.

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10072-013-1573-8

Coltheart, V., Mondy, S., Dux, P. E., & Stephenson, L. (2004). Effects of orthographic and

phonological word length on memory for lists shown at RSVP and STM rates. Journal of

Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30(4), 815-826.

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.30.4.815

Glaser, M., & Schwan, S. (2015). Explaining pictures: how verbal cues influence processing of

pictorial learning material. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107(4), 1006-1018.

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/edu0000044

Gonsalves, B., & Paller, K. (2000). Brain potentials associated with recollective processing of

spoken words. Memory & Cognition, 28(3), 321-330 10p.

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/BF03198547.

Pezdek, K., & Stevens, E. (1984). Children's memory for auditory and visual information on

television. Developmental Psychology, 20(2), 212-218.

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.20.2.212

Pilotti, M., Gallo, D., & Roediger HL, I. (2000). Effects of hearing words, imaging hearing

words, and reading on auditory implicit and explicit memory tests. Memory &

Cognition, 28(8), 1406-1418 13p. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/BF03211841

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Stack, S. (2015). Learning outcomes in an online vs traditional course. International Journal For

The Scholarship Of Teaching & Learning, 9(1), 1-18. Retrieved from

http://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/ij-sotl/vol9/iss1/5

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Visual Auditory0

5

10

15

20

25

Stimulus

Wor

ds

corr

ectl

y re

mem

ber

ed

Figure 1. Participants who were in the visual condition correctly remembered significantly more words than the auditory condition.

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females males0

5

10

15

20

25

Sex

Wor

ds

corr

ectl

y re

mem

ber

ed

Figure 2. There was an approaching significance between the words correctly memorized by females and males, in which females memorized more words than males.

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Appendix A

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Appendix B

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