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Abstract

Many students entering middle school experience increased difficulty in acquiring academic content vocabulary, especially in science. Content Acquisition Podcasts for Students (CAP-S) were developed over a decade ago to help remediate this issue and provide structured multimedia instruction on academic content vocabulary to help improve the acquisition and application of terms. This study sought to expand the CAP-S research base by examining the impact of three different formats of CAP-S on the understanding, retention, and application of science vocabulary terms in rural inclusive middle school classrooms. Participants included 271 students, 11% of whom had Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), served in rural settings. The CAP-S formats included increasingly intensive levels of instructional components. One-way ANOVAs with corrected post-hoc comparisons to probe significant findings were completed. Findings underscore the general effectiveness of CAP-S in improving science vocabulary knowledge for students in rural settings and highlight the need for further research into specific instructional components that may be used to continue to improve upon the CAP-S format. Implications for educators include leveraging multimedia tools to support rural and other diverse learners and considering classroom context when implementing vocabulary instruction are discussed.

Keywords

science content/curriculum area middle school age/grade level instructional technology technology perspectives high incidence disabilites exceptionality

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Using Multimedia Instruction to Improve Science Vocabulary Knowledge: Investigating Impact of Three Formats

Abstract

Keywords

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