Through reading the article of Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning (Richard E. Mayer, Roxana Moreno), I know the basic rationale of mind work and nine methods to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning.
The cognitive theory of multimedia learning constructs the relationship and order between the sensory of humans and words and images in multimedia to form a process that the brain addresses the multimedia materials. Thus, this process is the multimedia learning of humans.
The nine ways to reduce the cognitive load in multimedia in this article are Off-loading, Segmenting, Pretraining, Weeding, Signaling, aligning words and pictures, eliminating redundancy, Synchronizing, and Individualizing. I am most impressed by the two of these methods because it seems that I have the same experience. The one: Off-loading. I think that many persons except me have the experience. This is, when learning a theory, they were easier to understand the logic of this theory through listening to an explanation rather than watching the text. This is “Students understand a multimedia explanation better when the words are presented as narration rather than as on-screen text” said in this article. The other one is aligning words and pictures. In my memory, I once took an exam online. There are figure questions in this exam. But the text introduction for the figure is placed on another page, and questions for the figure are also place on the other third page. I need to return the figure page and then back the text introduction page when I am going to answer it after reading the title of the question. Maybe I have forgotten the answer given after understanding the figure through the text introduction when I came back to the questions page. That exam was simply a nightmare. As a result, I think that it is very necessary to align words and pictures for reducing the space between figure and text introduction, and which will be helpful for effective multimedia learning.
Reference:
Mayer, R., E., & Moreno, R. (2003). Nine ways to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 43-52.
Hello, Xiaojiao
I also agree with you very much. I also watched Dr. Mayer's video this week. I also think it is more efficient to study with pictures and words together. When reading an article, in the space design, if the picture and the text are together, it will be more understandable for the reader. I also agree that it’s better for presenting words in conversational style rather than formal style. That will make readers relate to their personal experiences more easily and additionally, makes them easier to learn through the reading experiences.
Thanks for sharing.
Sungling