La compréhension d'un document technique multimédia peut-elle être améliorée par une présentation séquentielle de son contenu?

Electronic technical documents are becoming increasingly common in many school-level, university and professional courses. These electronic documents offer a number of advantages over their paper counterparts. One of these is their ability to present visual information gradually in a way which is synchronized with the corresponding spoken explanation. Taking recent experimental results as our basis, we wished to compare this type of presentation with a static presentation of the same content in a training document on the subject of first aid. Our hypothesis was that the superiority of this type of presentation is not limited to content that is sequential in nature but extends to other content which has no specific temporal relations. This hypothesis was verified: the benefits of sequential presentation were revealed in a task involving knowledge of a series of actions which were carried out in a specific order. It also comprised questions which related to the recall of concepts where there was no specific order. The benefits of sequential presentation were then revealed in a knowledge transfer task. The consequences of this experiment for the design of electronic technical documents were then discussed.