Target Group Characteristics: Are Perceptional Modality Preferences Relevant for Instructional Materials Design?

Summary

In instructional development, one is often advised to take individual perceptional preferences into account when designing audiovisual materials. Perceptual and learning style research literature, however, offers no clear evidence for modality preferences for either video or audio. The same holds for other interlocking symbolic modalities: verbal and pictorial, and reading and listening. Here, too, no such thing as individual modality preference has been clearly proved. A relatively strong support is given to the dichotomy of visualizers/nonvisualizers. In the research literature these various dichotomies are not always clearly discriminated. Audiovisual design must deal with learner characteristics, such as perceptual preference, in the same way as it deals with other characteristics such as reading proficiency and prerequisite visual literacy: by building upon optimal prerequisite information and intuitive knowledge about the target group. There is not yet a legitimate theoretical basis for laborious typological differentiation within the target group.