Cognitive theory of multimedia learning

Mayer's Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning




For hundreds of years verbal messages such as lectures and printed lessons have been the primary means of explaining ideas to learners. Although verbal learning offers a powerful tool, this book explores ways of going beyond the purely verbal. Recent advances in graphics technology and information technology have prompted new efforts to understand the potential of multimedia learning as a means of promoting human understanding. In Multimedia Learning, Second Edition, Richard E. Mayer examines whether people learn more deeply when ideas are expressed in words and pictures rather than in words alone. He reviews 12 principles of instructional design that are based on experimental research studies and grounded in a theory of how people learn from words and pictures. The result is what Mayer calls the cognitive theory of multimedia learning, a theory first developed in the first edition of Multimedia Learning and further developed in The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning

The Science of E-Learning

Mayer (2003) defines a science of e-learning as including three elements: evidence, theory, and applications. According to Mayer, the element of evidence means that there is a base of replicated findings from rigorous and appropriate research studies. The element of theory requires that there must be a research-based theory of how people learn in electronic learning environments, which yields testable predictions. Applications are theory-based principles for how to design electronic learning environments, which themselves can be tested in research studies. As part of his evidence-seeking efforts for the science of e-learning, Mayer (2001, 2003) presents nine major effects which developed out of dozens of studies. These replicated effects are: modality effect, contiguity effect, multimedia effect, personalization effect, coherence effect, redundancy effect, pre-training effect, signaling effect, and the pacing effect. An explanation of each of these nine effects, referred to here as principles (Moreno & Mayer, 2000), follows: 

Mayer’s 10 Principles of Multimedia Instruction

Five Principles for Reducing Extraneous Processing^[3]

1. Coherence Principle: People learn better when extraneous material is excluded from a multimedia lesson.
2. Signalling Principle: People learn better when essential words are highlighted.
3. Redundancy Principle: People learn better from animation with narration than from animation with narration and text except when the onscreen text is short, highlights the key action described in the narration, and is placed next to the portion of the graphic that it describes. In 2008, Mayer revised this principle to include the exception noted here.^[10]
4. Spatial Contiguity Principle: People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.
5. Temporal Contiguity Principle: People learn better when corresponding narration and animation are presented simultaneously rather than successively (i.e. the words are spoken at the same time they are illustrated in the animation).

Three Principles for Managing Essential Processing^[3]

1. Segmenting Principle: People learn better when a narrated animation is presented in learner-paced segments rather than as a continuous presentation.
2. Pretraining Principle: People learn better from a narrated animation when they already know the names and characteristics of essential components.
3. Modality Principle: People learn better from graphics with spoken text rather than graphics with printed text.

Two Principles for Fostering Generative Processing^[3]

1. Multimedia Principle: People learn better from words and pictures than from words alone. This allows people to build connections between their verbal and pictorial models.
2. Personalization Principle: People learn better from a multimedia lesson when words are in conversational style rather than formal style. If people feel as though they are engaged in a conversation, they will make more effort to understand what the other person is saying

Putting it all Together
So now that we have covered an extensive range of vocabulary and concepts in just a few short pages, how do we apply all of it? The first thing is to recognize that I have only introduced most of these topics and that extensive literature is available on each of them. Two excellent introductory books for cognitive guidelines on multimedia instruction are Multi-media Learning by Richard Mayer (2001) and e-Learning and the Science of Instruction by Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard Mayer (2002). Searching for Intelligent Tutoring Systems on the Web will also give you an idea of some of the ways that cognitive theory is being applied to computer-based training. The ACT-R site (http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu) at Carnegie Mellon is also an interesting place to visit, plus they have an extensive library of freely downloadable publications related to ACT-R. My own experience in applying cognitive theory to multimedia education has been that my team has been creating online tutorials for several years now. Our mission is to provide training to staff and faculty on computer applications that are supported by the university’s Information Technology Services. This includes desktop software, the financial system, and the student-management system. But we are not immune to my own criticism. We have often violated many of the principles discussed in this paper and, in some cases, we continue to violate a few. It is a drawn out process to change a group’s practices when they have taken several years to form. The slowness of change can often also be attributed to the new skills or technologies that have to be acquired. The original search for better solutions came about because I suspected that many of the current educational technology theories were based on not much more than intuition or ivory tower theory that was not really grounded in any scientific method. While they sounded good, I was spending serious money from my budget and I wanted to be convinced, and more importantly I wanted to convince our stakeholders, that our efforts at instructional design were appropriate and really making a difference. As my team’s instructional technology and development skills improved, I began to wonder if we couldn’t improve our instructional delivery techniques by basing them in empirically tested theory. It was at this time that we began to look for a set of guidelines to make our instruction more effective and to provide a good return on investment to the university. It was at this point that we discovered and began to implement cognitive theory in our instructional design, specifically the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (Mayer, 2001, 2003). The team’s e-learning developers and I are currently focused on creating a rapid development process for online Flash-based animated tutorials. To create these tutorials, we first use Macromedia Captivate to capture our instruction on the computer and then we modify them directly in Macromedia Flash MX 2004. We had originally produced most of our videos with live instructor narration. They generally seem to do the job and seemed to follow the principles in the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning. Because live narration was very expensive and time consuming, however, we began to take the shortcut of creating courses which had video instruction, but used captions on the screen rather than narration. From our perspective, this was fine and an effective way to teach our end-users how to use new computer applications. However, once we discovered cognitive theory, the modality effect in particular, it became clear that this was probably not a very effective way to instruct. According to the modality principle, computer animation with narration produces better transfer than combining animation with on-screen text. This is because you need to try to use both working memory channels (visual and auditory) rather than overloading the visual channel with on-screen text and animation, while leaving the auditory channel practically unused. Some might point out that read text is actually converted into inner speech and held in auditory working memory, but then you could still argue that this is a violation of Sweller et al.’s (1998) split-attention effect which states that you should not design instruction that divides the learner’s attention between two tasks: studying the animation and reading the text. Because we did not have the time or resources to personally narrate every video, we eventually solved this problem by using a high-end computerized voice that transformed the captioned text into narration for each tutorial. This technology allows us to narrate in one or two days what used to take several days or even weeks to accomplish with a human instructor. One additional thing that I would eventually like to investigate is whether there is a difference in performance and transfer between recorded human narration and the slightly unnatural sound of computerized narration. Adding the computerized narration presented a new problem, however, that we are still working on at the time of this writing. Using Flash, we were able to add a button that toggles the narration on and off so that those who still prefer to read the captions in silence can do so, as well as doing something else such as listening to music or not disturbing their neighbors. But if the user wants to listen to the narration, we currently have not been able to hide the captions in a manner that we deem satisfactory for our end users. Once again, common sense might dictate that it is not that big of a deal to leave the captions up while the narration is playing, but according to the redundancy principle, this can overload the visual working memory and prevent learning. Because of this, our team has vowed to resolve this issue and will have a working solution with 100% performance soon. The end goal will be to have video tutorials in which the learner can toggle both the captions and voice on or off during the playing of the tutorial. It may have occurred to some readers that an apparent solution might be to simply not include the captions, but then the videos would not be accessible to the hearing impaired, which is an important consideration and a violation of Section 508 if you are creating the tutorials for a university or government organization in the United States. We had also seen other computer-based training where either an animated figure or a video of a person would “lecture” to the learner while text or animation appeared on the screen. My team had considered doing this because we had the capability to do it and it seemed like a good idea. We thought it would add sophistication and another dimension to the tutorials. But the coherence principle recommends avoiding using extraneous material such as irrelevant video or animations, which is what a talking head would be. This is also related to the split-attention effect from Cognitive Load Theory and is something we definitely should avoid. So the team scrapped the idea of including talking figures in our tutorials. We try to make or narrations as conversational in style as possible, (although this is sometimes difficult with computerized narration) and have tried to avoid using stiff third person narration. This follows the personalization principle which states that better transfer occurs when narration is conducted in a conversational first or second person style. The pacing principle states that learners should be able to control the speed and pauses in the multimedia lesson. We have accomplished this to a certain extent by including a control bar that Captivate generates when the movie is created. The control bar allows the learner to pause, rewind, and fast-forward the video. One additional feature that our clients have asked for is the ability to speed up or slow down the video, which we still haven’t accomplished yet. Controlling the speed of multimedia is one of the features called for in the pacing principle, however, and we won’t be satisfied until we have added that critical feature for our end-users. The other two principles that I haven’t discussed in this section, the pre-training principle and the signaling principle, are critical factors that I also want to include in our instructional planning, but that we currently seem to be doing more by accident than by design. They are equally important, though, and I plan to emphasize them with the team as soon as we have solved some of the other issues mentioned above. I also haven’t found a good way to promote self-explaining behaviors in this type of training yet, but it is an area that I plan to investigate as we solve some of the other issues. 


References:
http://inform.nu/Articles/Vol8/v8p263-279Sorden34.pdf http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521735351/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0521735351&linkCode=as2&tag=learningthe
http://etec.ctlt.ubc.ca/510wiki/Cognitive_Theory_of_Multimedia_Learning#Mayer.E2.80.99s_10_Principles_of_Multimedia_Instruction
http://www.google.lk/imgres?imgurl=http://image.slidesharecdn.com/citmedit8150-tpv5b-091201090721-phpapp02/95/cognitive-theory-of-multimedia-learning-8-728.jpg%253Fcb%253