Engl. transl.: Media Education. What role does it play in learning difficulties?

This chapter deals with the role of media education tools and strategies to help students with learning difficulties. Building on findings from three different studies covering areas such as the use of audiovisual tools, educational CD/DVDs, and hypertext in educational contexts and for pedagogical activities with children with learning difficulties, the contribution draws some conclusions on how media education can implement the learning experience of these students.

[...] Research suggests that multimedia (whether in the form of combining oral and visual messages, or written text and images) helps students with attention difficulties in learning tasks. However, this benefit appears to occur only if the content to be learned is concrete in nature. Visual representations of a schematic kind, through which an attempt is made to render abstract concepts in an iconic form, appear to be ineffective, probably because their interpretation is not immediate and therefore requires additional mental work (which makes the task more burdensome, especially for low-achieving students). Multimedia appears to be a distinct characteristic of didactic technologies, as far as the effects on cognitive processes are concerned, from hypertextuality, although the two are often combined. While the first one is helpful for students with attentional difficulties, the second is not, also in this case probably because an open organization of the contents requires an additional commitment from the student (to evaluate the options, to choose the content to be accessed, to remember the units already inspected, etc.), and this, in the case of problems in attention management, takes away resources for the latter process. Interestingly, the presence of visual elements in addition to verbal ones allows pupils with attention difficulties to perform close to those of their peers without difficulties. The advantages of multimedia affect all types of knowledge that need to be learned and are maintained in time. In conclusion, multimedia stands out as a dimension of educational tools that can meet the needs of students with Special Educational Needs, in particular, with respect to the data documented here, of those who have difficulty in controlling their attention, a skill that is at the basis of almost all the activities offered at school. (Antonietti, 2015, pp. 91-93, translated).