Design Recommendations for Using Textual Aids in Data-Science Programming Courses

Despite a recent shift towards online learning, recommendations for multimedia design principles in programming-based instruction remain unclear. Specifically, how can we teach people to code, a text-heavy medium, properly in online instruction? This question is especially important since the text-based format of screencasts may interact with psychological mechanisms known to affect cognitive processing and learning. We investigate this question, and find that previous results from other domains do not necessarily hold in the programming education. We also explore how design changes in textual aids affect learners' performance in programming-based multimedia learning. Our results suggest that the redundancy effect does not significantly hinder learning, which conflicts with previous findings, and that the spatial contiguity effect occurs even between textual components. This work contributes to an evidence-based understanding of how to design more effective multimedia learning environments for programming-based instruction.