Notes Mayer, Richard

Notes Mayer, Richard. 2001. Multimedia Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In this book Mayer, a cognitive psychologist at UC Santa Barbara, presents a position on multimedia learning (for him, multimedia means two media only: words plus pictures) that is based on a 10 year program of cognitive research. “The goal of this book is to offer a scientific approach to the development of design principles…. In this book I summarize a systematic program of research aimed at understanding how people learn from words and pictures that explain how something works. The work is limited to short, causal explanations, to learning by college students, and to a few fundamental principles.” (193) (His research concerns college students learning how things work such as bicycle pumps, lightning storms, and automobile brakes.) Mayer contrasts his effort to build a scientific foundation for multimedia design with Tufte’s work, which he puts in the category of “the intuitions of thoughtful scholars.”

The finding of the research is that multimedia works – it benefits learning. Furthermore, Mayer argues that by following a number of tested design principles designers can make effective instructional multimedia.

Mayer’s research supports a view of learning as knowledge construction rather than information transmission.

“The learner is an active sense-maker who experiences a multimedia presentation and tries to organize and integrate the presented material into a coherent mental representation.” (13) “Multimedia is a sense-making guide…, an aid to knowledge construction.” (15)

He reviews the results of dozens of instructional experiments that he and his collaborators have conducted with college students. In these experiments college students were presented with two instructional messages that differed systematically in some way that the investigators wanted to test – say, pictures very close to text and pictures further from text. After instruction, they tested students on retention and transfer. For example, in learning about bicycle pumps, the retention test asked students to write an explanation of how a bicycle pump works. They scored the explanations by how many steps in the explanation students gave correctly. The transfer test asked them: “What could be done to make a pump more reliable?” “…more effective?” “Suppose you pushed the handle up and down several times and nothing happened. What could be wrong?” Again, students were scored on how many correct or plausible responses they were able to invent.

In chapter 3 he offers a cognitive theory of multimedia learning and he uses this theory subsequently to interpret the results of the experiments. He relies on three fundamental principles from cognitive psychology: dual channels (auditory and visual), limited capacity, and active processing. He offers detailed models of the cognitive and sensory processing students must do in each experiment and uses these models to explain the experimental results.

The findings of the research support the following design principles. Students learn better . from words and pictures than from words alone. . when corresponding words and pictures are near each on the page or screen. . when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively. . when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than included. . from animation and narration than from animation and on-screen text. . from animation and narration than from animation and narration and on-screen text.

Also, design effects are greater for low-knowledge learners than for high-knowledge learners and for high-spatial learners than for low-spatial learners. (p. 184)

Mayer advocates concise narrated animations (CNAs) for teaching about cause effect systems. A CNA consists of a concise narrated explanation played simultaneously with a concise animation depicting the cause-effect system. For texts, he recommends concise annotated illustrations (CAIs) “a concise series of frames, each with concise coordinated text captions.” (p. 191-2)

******************** Other items in the book that may be of interest to learning designers: Citing Levin and Meyer (1993) he states seven design principles for effective use of illustrations in text: Concentrated – the key ideas are highlighted in both text and pictures Concise – extraneous words and visual elements are minimized Correspondent – corresponding text and pictures are near each other on the page Concrete – text and pictures allow for easy visualization Coherent – the material has a clear structure Comprehensible – learners have the background to understand them Codable – key words and picture elements are used consistently (p. 24)

He also refers to five kinds of knowledge structures (p. 52)

Process Flow chart Comparison Matrix Generalization Branching tree Enumeration List Classification Hierarchy

He cites a study (Mayer, Tims, and Tajika, 1995) showing that “the overwhelming majority of illustrations [in textbooks] served no important instructional purpose.” (77)

Graphic advance organizers showed powerful effects in one study (Mayer, 1989a, 1983). He claims they serve as ‘models for understanding.’ Graphic advance organizers are labeled illustrations of fundamental processes. He thinks they serve to mobilize learners’ prior knowledge. “Overall, research on illustrations in text yields two important results relevant to the multimedia effect: (1) textbook authors who add illustrations to their text often fail to take full advantage of the potential power of graphics as an aid to understanding, and (2) adding a carefully designed graphic advance organizer to a text passage can greatly enhance student understanding.” (p. 78) When designers suspect that different instruction may be optimal for different students, they have three basic options: individualize (offer different students different instruction adapted to them), combine multiple methods (a shotgun approach where you provide something for everyone in one combined instructional treatment), or pre-train (bringing all students to the point where they can profit from the optimal instruction). Individualization is risky unless you have a very accurate, reliable way to differentiate students. If not, you risk giving misclassified students a poorer treatment than they would have gotten if you didn’t individualize. A shotgun approach includes more extraneous material for all learners and is unlikely to be optimal. Pre-training is best when it is feasible. (p 181)