Multimedia Information Access in Support of Knowledge Construction Mimi Recker Ashwin Ram George T. Li Terry Shikano John Stasko College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 Multimedia repositories, libraries, and databases offer the potential for providing students access to a wide variety of information resources and activities. Moreover, network-accessibility allows these resources to be distributed over wide distances. However, information access is not, by itself, sufficient. Instead, multimedia systems should support access to information and activities that support effective knowledge construction and learning. In this presentation, we describe a theory for designing educational multimedia systems (Recker and Ram, 1994). The theory argues that rather than base the design of multimedia systems on the physical properties of the information (e.g., pictures, audio, video, etc.), the structure and content of the system should be based on cognitive aspects of the users of that information. By this, we mean that the access methods in a multimedia systems should be "cognitively relevant" to the learning and information seeking goals of the student. These "cognitive media types" form the basic building blocks of the system. They are based on an understanding of the learning and constructive processes of students, and encapsulate different methods or strategies for problem solving and learning. These strategies rely on specific media characteristics that facilitate specific learning activities, which in turn are enabled by specific kinds of physical media. We illustrate our theory by describing an educational multimedia environment we are developing and using in the context of an introductory computer science class at Georgia Tech. The courseware contains cognitive media types such as descriptions, examples, case studies, and constructive visualizations, which allow students to learn basic algorithm concepts. We are performing an assessment of the courseware by analyzing student patterns of activities (recorded by the software), complemented with more qualitative methods. We believe that the self-paced nature of the environment, coupled with multimedia information access and constructive activities organized into cognitive media types, supports students in developing deep intuitions about important algorithms, and how they can be used to solve engineering problems. Acknowledgment Funding for this work was partially provided by the NSF to SUCCEED (Cooperative agreement No. EID-9109853). SUCCEED is a coalition of eight schools and colleges working to enhance engineering education for the twenty-first century. This work was also supported by the Army Research Institute under contract no. MDA-903-90-K-0112 to Janet Kolodner, by the EduTech Institute, and by the Georgia Institute of Technology. infypeineSUlalallnt"litraia I¸tiorib