Mayer's Modality Principle

This video explains Dr. Richard E. Mayer's Modality Principle, one of his Multimedia Design Principles for designing more effective learning experiences. For the Modality Principle, Dr. Mayer's research found that we should use voice-over narration in our multimedia learning designs instead of using on-screen text. The research found that people learn more deeply when words are spoken by a narrator and heard by the learner rather than when the learner reads the words on-screen. This principle is predicated on Allan Paivo's Dual Coding Theory. That theory postulates that our brains process visual and verbal information in separate "channels". And each channel has a limited capacity to process information. When we use voice-over rather than onscreen text, the learner's brain gets to off-load some of the visual channel processing from reading the on-screen text to the verbal channel that is processing what the learner is hearing, and this frees up the visual channel processing to focus on the non-verbal visual information. A note of caution: The research on this principle found that applying it may not be effective in some situations. One situation is when the verbal information contains technical terms that are better read on-screen than heard. Another situation is when there is too much verbal information to be held in the learner's working memory. And finally, if the learners are not native speakers of the language, it may be more effective for them to read rather than hear the verbal information. Mayer's Principles for Managing Essential Processing This is one of Dr. Mayer's principles related to the instructional goal of "managing essential processing" when designing multimedia learning experiences. Once we've gone through applying Mayer's principles related to reducing extraneous processing (i.e. getting rid of the junk and focusing the learner's attention on the important information), we still have to be careful about not overwhelming learners with information. If we don't, we run the serious risk of causing a "cognitive overload" for the learner. Our brains are already inundated with sensory information coming from every direction in the world we live in... add that on top of the multimedia information we're trying to teach our learners. Try to imagine all that sensory information coming at us like a fire hose. We can get easily overpowered by it without carefully managing the flow coming at us. And that's where these principles come in... to manage the flow of information and prevent cognitive overload.