Friday, May 27, 2011

Multimedia Learning by Richard E. Mayer

A few years ago, I was skeptical of PowerPoint, going along with the assumption that PowerPoint presentations had to be dull. I unthinkingly bought presentation guru Edward Tufte's claim that PowerPoint is evil, that "Power corrupts and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."

Well, I'm a convert -- PowerPoint presentations are at the heart of my electronic text. I believe presentations combining slides and narration can be effective teaching tools, and I just read a book of research supporting that claim.

Richard E. Mayer, a UCSB psychologist, reports on 93 controlled studies in his book Multimedia Learning. Mayer's experiments test a dozen presentation principles, which he hypothesizes to be true, and 92 of those studies confirm the hypothesis.

For example, consider his redundancy principle, which holds that people learn better from graphics and narration than from graphics, narration and text -- the text is a redundant distraction.

To test this principle, Mayer and his colleagues ran five experiments in which one group learned from a multimedia presentation with narrated graphics and a second group saw the same presentation with text captions below the graphics. The non-caption group learned more in all five experiments.

He also gives theoretical explanations for his principles. The redundancy principle follows from visual overload in seeing captions and images simultaneously and mental effort expended in comparing spoken narration and written text. Mayer also explores the boundary conditions of his principles. Redundancy is less of a distraction if the captions are short or the text is shown after the narration finishes, not while it is playing.

Here are Mayer's twelve principles. Don't be bound by them, but use them as a checklist when going back over an old presentation or planning a new one.
  • Coherence Principle: People learn better when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than included.
  • Signaling Principle: People learn better when cues that highlight the organization of the essential material are added.
  • Redundancy Principle: People learn better from graphics and narration than from graphics, narration, and on-screen text.
  • 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.
  • Temporal Contiguity Principle: People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.
  • Segmenting Principle: People learn better when a multimedia lesson is presented in user-paced segments rather than as a continuous unit.
  • Pre-training Principle: People learn better from a multimedia lesson when they know the names and characteristics of the main concepts.
  • Modality Principle: People learn better from graphics and narration than from animation and on-screen text.
  • Multimedia Principle: People learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.
  • Personalization Principle: People learn better from multimedia lessons when words are in conversational style rather than formal style.
  • Voice Principle: People learn better when the narration in multimedia lessons is spoken in a friendly human voice rather than a machine voice.
  • Image Principle: People do not necessarily learn better from a multimedia lesson when the speaker’s image is added to the screen.
Let me close by suggesting two Mayer-like experiments that I would like to see run. One is a test of the effectiveness of showing images followed by the images with captions, the other a study of the effect of changing the tempo of a presentation. I'd love to hear the results if you run the experiments.

10 comments:

  1. Larry, I'm one of those "skeptical of PowerPoint" folks so this is worth checking out-- thanks for the review. I'm influenced not just by Tufte, but by Sherry Turkle, whose perspective is different but is also anti-PowerPoint. I guess in each case the claim is that PowerPoint (as most people use it) tends to restrict the presented info too much, and dumbs down the recipient's thinking about that info. This applies even in education, even at tech & educator conferences where new, exciting things are supposed to happen. :-) Their solution (writ large, exceptions noted) is not to change how the tool is used but to change tools.

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  2. Gstarion said:

    > this is worth checking out

    There are also a lot of PPT "how-to" books, but this one is based in experimental research.


    > influenced not just by Tufte

    It seems to me that Tufte's graphics are often geared toward focused study rather than illustrations in an audience presentation.

    My compromise is to use concise, Mayer-like material for a presentation before an audience, and also provide written detail and links to other things for subsequent study at one's own pace.

    One also has to adjust the sophistication of the audience and the purpose of the presentation. I would use Tufte-like material in a presentation before experts who were deeply involved -- say a scientific presentation or one to serious investors -- and the more concise Mayer-like material in a presentation to students in an intro course.


    > Sherry Turkle

    I am unfamiliar with her views of PPT -- have you any links? (BTW -- just the other day, I watched a video of her giving a PPT presentation at a conference :-).

    > not to change how the tool is used but to change tools.

    What are some other good presentation tools?

    Larry

    PS -- I spelled out some of my PPT guidelines in the presentation at:

    http://cis275topics.blogspot.com/2011/03/powerpoint-is-ok.html

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  3. Can you sum it up in one or two sentences. That is, what would the ideal Power Point look like? Would it contain text, graphics and voice or just text and graphics? Would only some (what percentage?) have voice?

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  4. The PPT how-to books and the many sites with presentation tips are fine. Other slide (or "slide") tools such as Prezi are doing their best to breathe some new life into the dry legacy style. I like the approach even though I'm not skilled with them yet.

    There is too much truth in "Death by PowerPoint" in what I've observed from many educators & business folks using it for the wrong purposes-- and I am not w/o sin.

    FYI I'm not totally anti. But I do want my students to be able to pick from a range which may include PPT as one option of many. It should not be the default, and right now it is with most of us and most students. Your approach and analysis is not that typical. Coming back to PPT after due consideration of what you want to present is not the same as just using it because it's handy.

    Turkle says in one recent interview: "PowerPoints are about simple, communicable ideas illustrated by powerful images, and there’s a place for that. But that isn’t the same as critical thinking. Great books are not fancied-up PowerPoint presentations. Great books take you through an argument, show how the argument is weak, meet objections, and show a different point of view. By the time you’re through with all that, you’re way beyond the simplicities of PowerPoint.

    "Computers are seductive; computers are appealing. There’s no harm in using the seductive and appealing to draw people in, to get them in their seats, and to begin a conversation. The question is, what happens after that?"

    Most of the time, nothing happens after that.

    Here are the two Turkle articles I have used-- there are more (and more scholarly) out there. I sometimes have freshmen read these. (Via our databases, not scanned PDFs.)

    From Powerful Ideas to PowerPoint (see esp. section "Presentation as its own powerful idea")

    How Computers Change the Way We Think

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  5. Richard said:

    >Can you sum it up in one or two sentences. That is, what would the ideal Power Point look like?


    No -- it is a function of many things -- the nature of the material, the sophistication and interest level of the consumer, the purpose of the presentation, the setting (classroom, auditorium, two person sales pitch, etc.), etc.

    I give some tips that have worked for me in the classroom in the presentation at:

    http://cis275topics.blogspot.com/2011/03/powerpoint-is-ok.html

    but I am making presentations to beginning students in a classroom where we can interact and my goal is getting them sufficiently interested in the topic to study and learn the material.

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  6. Gstation said:


    > Prezi

    I've looked at some Prezis, but never tried making one.


    > I am not w/o sin.

    Me either!


    > But that isn’t the same as critical thinking. Great books are not fancied-up PowerPoint presentations.

    For sure -- they are totally different things used for totally different reasons. I am not trying to choose between making 4 PPT presentations in a week and assigning 4 great books in a week :-).

    Thanks for the links George! I'll follow them.

    Larry

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  7. Thanks for posting this, Larry. I do use powerpoint for some of my lectures, and am fascinated by the ways that it can be useful for sparking critical thinking. One of the things I do in several of my classes is have students create powerpoints as a storytelling device, with the rules being that they need to carefully select the photo or graphic for each slide, and use a maximum of 20 words per slide. They gain a lot of insight into the process of communication and the problems of finding graphics/images that are actually relevant to the thoughts and concepts they are trying to express. What I don't like to do is depend on powerpoint as the major mode of communication with the class, but rather as a way to present some of the material. PPT is a tool that can become part of the banking method of teaching--a visual alternative to the canned lecture of the past.
    Multimedia resources are plentiful. A guide can be created by profs for students to move through online exhibits or photoessays, etc. An interesting new photoessay that can be used as an alternative text, for which students can be asked to comment on, etc. is Going South, Coming North: Migration and Union Organizing in Morristown, Tennessee by Fran Ansley, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
    Anne Lewis, University of Texas, Austin

    http://southernspaces.org/2011/going-south-coming-north-migration-and-union-organizing-morristown-tennessee

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  8. Vivian said:

    > I do use powerpoint for some of my lectures, and am fascinated by the ways that it can be useful for sparking critical thinking.


    Tell us more about those fascinating ways you mention. In the Internet era, students and faculty need to learn to create content -- text, video, ppt, etc. And you are right on in tying this to critical thinking -- we nearly always learn while trying to express or communicate an idea.

    > One of the things I do in several of my classes is have students create powerpoints as a storytelling device

    Cool. Do they post them online?

    Lar

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  9. Vivian wrote:

    > An interesting new photoessay that can be used as an alternative text, for which students can be asked to comment on, etc. is Going South, Coming North: Migration and Union Organizing in Morristown, Tennessee by Fran Ansley, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
    Anne Lewis, University of Texas, Austin

    http://southernspaces.org/2011/going-south-coming-north-migration-and-union-organizing-morristown-tennessee

    That is a terrific example -- a text-audio-video essay. Students and faculty need to learn new ways to communicate. From a faculty perspective, creating a photo essay like that should earn credit in the RTP process. See this post:

    http://cis471.blogspot.com/2011/04/faculty-retention-tenure-and-promotion.html

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  10. Larry, Have you tried Presio? It sounds like it fits Mayer's ideas the best by combining PowerPoint and Video/Audio. After that, it's up to the presenter to make the PPT words short & concise and well organized.

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