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I recently learned about a new study on multi-media learning from Pedro de Bruyckere.

To tell you the truth, I didn’t really understand what it was about after reading the abstract. The full paper is behind a paywall, but I was able to get a prepublication version of it.

The paper is titled “Multimedia Design for Learning: An Overview of Reviews With Meta-Meta-Analysis.”

I seems to basically review studies that research “design principles” for multimedia and how they can affect learning.

In looking through the paper, it’s still unclear to me how all these strategies specifically relate to multimedia – many are applicable to just plain instructional strategies.

Here are some excerpts from the paper that seemed particularly useful – to me, at least:

There were large effects were for captioning videos on second-language learning

there were large benefits of having materials presented contiguously…Spatial contiguity is where related material is put close together, rather than in different parts of the media (e.g., labels on a diagram, rather than in a legend)….Temporal contiguity, like spatial contiguity, refers to the benefits of presenting connected information together, but in time, rather than in space (e.g., presenting one bullet-point at a time as the presenter talks to each, rather than all bullets at once).

Signaling has been extensively studied and was shown to increase learning. Signals are cues that help the learner know where to direct their attention (e.g., arrows, highlighted text, a laser pointer).

Segmenting materials involves breaking the lesson or video into meaningful chunks. For example, rather than presenting one long lecture on multimedia design principles, segmenting would involve a series of smaller lessons, one on each design principle.

the benefits of personalisation: changing language to be either simpler, more polite, or more related to the learner (Ginns et al., 2013). This review showed that all of these modifications were equally effective, and they increase learning…

Verbal redundancy enhanced learning outcomes overall…Verbal redundancy refers to the effects of communicating words both visually and aurally.

 

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