Educators should apply evidence-based multimedia design principles, prioritising the largest-effect strategies¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 9 claims (9 for) · 8 studies (4 quant-synthesis, 2 causal, 2 review), q2–q4 · 4 of 8 report an effect size · 7 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The article closes by highlighting "a range of evidence-based strategies that could be implemented by educators", drawn from the meta-meta-analytic comparison of design principles on a common metric. Educators and instructional designers can implement captioning for second-language video, integrated (contiguous) layouts, signaling, spoken rather than on-screen text when images accompany content, segmenting, personalisation, and removal of seductive details, matching the strategy to the medium's pacing and complexity.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Educators need to know which design principle fits their medium (system- vs learner-paced) and material complexity before applying it

Constraints¶

• Verbal redundancy only helps when adding text to audio, not audio to text; decorative animations showed no benefit; 3D pedagogical agents showed no benefit

Target Learners¶

• educators and instructional designers across schools, universities, and adult learning contexts

Target Learning Goals¶

• improving learning and cognitive load management from multimedia instruction

Affordances¶

• Cognitive Load Theory Multimedia Overview
• Cognitive Theory Of Multimedia Learning Dual Channel

Claims¶

• Captioning second-language videos produces large benefits for comprehension and vocabulary acquisition [+W]
• Presenting related material contiguously in space and time yields large learning benefits [+W]
• Design principle effects are larger in system-paced and in complex media, and learner prior knowledge was not a significant moderator (p = 0.14) [+W]
• Multimedia design interventions yield small average improvements in cognitive load management (g = 0.22), with personalisation and modality showing the largest effects [+W]
• Modality effect: hearing text alongside visuals improves learning more than reading text alongside visuals [+W]
• Multimedia design principles improve learning by g = 0.38 on average across the 11 largest reviews, an effect the authors call moderate, with large differences between principles [+W]
• Signaling Improves Learning [+M]
• Signaling principle: highlighting essential words improves transfer from multimedia lessons [+W]
• Segmenting Improves Multimedia Learning [+M]

Related Strategies¶

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Noetel, M., Griffith, S., Delaney, O., Harris, N. R., Sanders, T., Parker, P., del Pozo Cruz, B., & Lonsdale, C. (2022). Multimedia design for learning: An overview of reviews with meta-meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543211052329