Join us as the elearningdesigners.org team chats with Dr. Richard Mayer, a prolific educational researcher and Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California Santa Barbara. In this interview with Dr. Richard Mayer, we ask him whether Mayer’s Principles and Accessibility can coincide and what an ideal “dream world” might look like. We learn more about the types of learners that were involved in the research that led to the creation and continual re-validation of Mayer’s Principles.
We explore common misinterpretations of his principles and have a deeper discussion about the importance of understanding boundary conditions and why the principles should not be interpreted as singular sentences in isolation.
Dr. Richard Mayer was named the #1 most productive educational psychologist in the world in Contemporary Educational Psychology. As of this video’s release on December 06, 2022, his work has been cited 192,563 times on Google Scholar alone. We are so lucky and appreciative to have had this opportunity to interview one of Learning Science’s brightest minds and a true living legend in the educational world.
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You can get your own copy of Dr. Richard Mayer’s latest book, Multimedia Learning, on Amazon or Cambridge University Press.
You can also check out our Mayer’s Principles Poster and Accessibility Resources from our Live Bookchat on Mayer’s Principles and Accessibility.
Video Transcript:
Georgette: So as you know, many instructional designers use your principles as a foundation for designing learning experiences. However, the depth of understanding and the knowledge of your principles would vary greatly. You know from person to person and as a result, many learning and development professionals see that the redundancy principle and the modality principle as being noninclusive and not conducive to universal design practices. So my question is, how do you see accessibility fitting within the principles of your book? Richard Mayer: Oh, that’s a that’s a really good question, Georgette. It’s something I’ve thought about, but it’s obviously not been our major focus. So we really need a lot of help in this area of accessibility and how to. You know, adjust and adapt the principles that we’ve established for, you know, diverse sets of learners. So I think that’s a really, I think that’s really important goal. For us.And you know, as some. Uh. Cecil, Cecil said. There are boundary conditions to all of these principles. They’re not I I never intended them to be like this is the way you have to do things we always have to understand. Who are the learners? What’s the content? What’s the situation? What are our goals? And mainly we have to understand how do people process information and how can we present? Um, material in a way that. That is, you know, consistent with the way our cognitive architecture is set up. So, I completely agree with the thrust of your question and specifically about redundancy. I mean, I think that is certainly a principle that has lots of boundary conditions depending on the characteristics of the learners and and of course you want, you want to have both printed text and spoken text for. I mean, there are lots of groups of learners we’ve been looking at learning in a second language, for example. And in many cases having subtitles is is.Is helpful and a lot of a lot of college instruction around the world’s in English, but the learners. For the learners, English isn’t their first language. So we need a lot more research on how to how to design those situations. But certainly there I don’t think the redundancy principle applies and it obviously doesn’t apply for people who have. Challenges with sight or hearing so.I completely agree with the thrust of your question. The same goes for modality if.If you have hearing disorders, then yeah, we need, we need topresent words in printed text rather than spoken. But I think it goes a lot deeper than that. There are huge individual differences in the way people process information, and I think we’re just beginning to understand how to adapt these principles for. A wider group of learners, I hope that answers your questions. That makes sense. Georgette: Yes, thank you.
Chaka: And I was going to ask and it you sort of talked about this because I am doing a little bit of research for one of my classes right now about having printed text with narration specifically. And most of the research that I’ve found is forsecond language learners. But have we done any of that or have you done any of that research or know of any research about having printed text with narration but no other graphical elements and whether or not that helps people learn? Richard Mayer: Yeah, it I think it doesn’t hurt. I mean, it’s not a violation of the redundancy principle because you have the print coming in through your visual system. You have the words coming in through your auditory channel. So you you have not, you’ve not, you haven’t overloaded the visual channel. That’s the problem when you have printed text graphics. And narration at the same time. Then you can have split attention between the printed text and the graphics. Or couldbe you know, a video or animation. But in this case where there’s no graphics. You’re not overloading the cognitive system, so I I think we’ve eliminated that problem. And when you’re learning likeyou’re saying in a second language, it can be helpful. To at least to see part of the narration in print because somesome words are kind of hard to hear, especially if they’re technical words. I mean this is even learning in your first language for technical words and just complicated. Terms it’s it’s probably helpful to see them. So I think we need a lot more research on what’s the right balance. Do we need to have everything in print or could we just have the hard part in print, something like that because Ithink one problem, one problem with you know listening to narration is it’s a lot slower than than reading. You can read a lot faster than you can listen. So in that sense it’s inefficient. But there are situations where you’re just you want to listen so. But just to answer your question, yeah, the researchwe’ve done shows it doesn’t hurt to have them both at the sametime. Whether it’s helpful, I think, you know, kind of it kind of depends on, like I said, the complexity of the material where there’s a lot of technical terms, whether the words are unfamiliar for the learners. Does that make sense? Chaka: Indeed it does. And just as a sidenote, I think that a lot of the sort of audiobook providers have the ability to let you speed upyour narration so that it can match your reading speed. And I think that can be very impactful as well. Richard Mayer: That’s that’s verytrue.Although.Starts to sound like a chipmunk, so there’s got to be a way to deal with that too. Right. Umm.You know, John Sweller and his folks talk about the transitory nature of spoken text, so that’s another issue when it’s printed. You have a little more learner control. For where you put your eyes and and you can go back and reread, but when it’s spoken once, it’s gone. It’s it’s gone and it’s not going to last that long in your working memory, so that’s another issue to keep keep in mind.
Cecil: Thank. Thank you for answering that because we actually had a bigdebate in our live chat, which will probably be very boring for you. But it’s me, Chaka, Courtney, like all arguing over this, but I’m going to, I’m going to clarify the question a little bit to see if it’s the same answer. So Umm, Chaka was kind of talking about second or language learners, right? non-native speakers. So if we have regular speakers and we say that they’re pretty familiar with the words because I know your boundary condition. Because you know whether or not the lexicon’s like very technical or very new to them. So let’s say it’s regular, regular, is a terrible term. Richard Mayer: You’re learning in your first language. Yes, it’s native learner. Yeah, learners who are native speakersof the language and they’re not learning new technical terms. Does it? If it does not violate the redundancy and modalityprinciple? Does it impede modality offloading if you are looking at graphics and listening to the exact same graphics at the same time? Because I know it’s different when you just see like select terms, right? And you’relistening to narration. So in this case, if you are getting both exactly at the same time, does that mean you’re not doing modality offloading or impeding it? Richard Mayer: Describe the situation again so you have graphics and narration? Cecil: Printed text and narration that are exactly the same. So kind of the same thing Chaka described. You said it doesn’t hurt or violate the modality and redundancy principle. And I guess my question is, but does it impede how you describe modality offloading? Richard Mayer: I guess the reason we want modality offloading is if we need the visual channel you know to process. Visual material that we might have around, so if there’s no graphics then we don’t have to offload. I guess this is the idea. Does that make sense? Cecil: Yes, Chaka was right. Richard Mayer: I don’t know if anybody’s right. The way I see it. I think we’re all kind of searching for how to how to make this all work and what are good design principles that are consistent with. What we know about human information processing, so it’s. It’s kind of a logic problem and an empirical problem.
Cecil: Thank you for that. And you kind of mentioned Sweller just just a moment [ago]. So I know that in the 3rd edition of Multimedia Learning you cite Sweller for a boundary condition when modalityoffloading doesn’t work so well for learners with low working memory capacity. Now I don’t know if Sweller was explicitly testing that group of learners or that those groups of learners were just in his general student population, but the question is, Has your research included, whether explicitly or not, neurodivergent learners and learners with disabilities, such as those who cannot see or hear. Richard Mayer: Well, I’m sure we’ve included neurodivergent learners. Without explicitly, you know, targeting them because they’re a big part of our population. We know if we just look at I know like the statistics that UCSB we there’s a. You know, a substantial percentage of neurodivergent learners, but we haven’t specifically targeted them in our research and we haven’t tried to specifically look at how the principles might apply. But that’s an area that I think we really need a lot more research in. I’m I’m really particularly interested in learners who have what’s the best way to put this attention control challenges, because I. Think these are the learners that probably would benefit the most from, you know, good, good instructional design. If you have good executive function skills. You might be able to survive poorly designed instruction, but if your executive function skills your like your ability to multitask or to. You know, inhibit processing of irrelevant material or just control yourattention, so you focus on the relevant material. If if those are challenges for you, then I think that’s where good instructional design can be particularly helpful. So I’m kind of excited about the idea of trying to work with that population. But we haven’t. We’ve talked about it a lot in my lab, but we haven’t really done it in a systematic way. I mean, I mean we could just define it as, you know, working memory. Sometimes people define it as, you know, working memory challenges having a. Scoring lower on a working memory capacity test or working memory processing. But I think we need to be more specific about what’s going on there. So that’s where. That’s why I like to look more at the issue of executive function, which is certainly related to working memory. And really the issue of attentional control. So yeah, just there’s a long answer to your question, but so. I haven’t explicitly been working with neurodivergent learners or learners with disabilities, but I do think that’s something I’d like to do, and I do think that’s somethingwe need a lot more research on. Cecil: Thank you. Chaka: We know some people that might want to help you work on that. So if you ever like, need some contacts. The person that we had that was working at Space Center Houston, one of myfriends, Rachel Schwartzman, is one of the well. She’s one of the growing minds in that field. So just let us know if you want to work with her. Richard Mayer: Sure. Just ever shoot me an e-mail, I’d love to find out more about it. I mean, it’s. It’s it’s just. The. An area. Where we could do a lot of good. So I would like to to think more about it.
Cecil: I think it’s difficult to find the balance between and. This came up in our live book chat where if we automatically turn captions on, Rachel was saying the benefit of that is that people don’t have to disclose their disabilities. The drawback of that would be violating the principles for people who don’t need it. So there’s really a good question. And I know people are always looking for a universal yes or no, and there is none because it depends on the conditions. But I guess what would your recommendation be in that case for trying to balance, you know, avoiding people to have to self-disclose versus you know, doing what is most beneficial I guess instructionally? Richard Mayer: So you have to design things that are accessible and I think the the way it’s often done is the way you’re doing it. You just put everything there and then you have to opt out. But like you say that that a lot of people don’t opt out. A lot of people. Don’t do they. Just go with whatever is being presented to them. And if it would be better for that, let’s say for the captions not to be there for some learners. Then it would be better to have an opt in system so. I think that’s a really hard, hard, hard issue about how toset it up. I mean, in my dream world I would have like a preliminary lesson where you get to see different versions of it and choose the version that you’re most comfortable with. I think that would probably be the the best way to do it. Like, I just had a set up a TV and you have all these choices for you. Do you want captions? You want all these things? So at least in the beginning it gives you kind of a yes or no choice. It doesn’t. It doesn’t just do it one way and then you have to opt in or out. But it gives you choices without really telling you what the implications are of those choices. So I think it would be good to have like a little trial run and then you have kind of yes, no choice on what you want to do. Chaka: I’d like that. Just like I feel like we live in a world where you’re settings should be remembered and even the software that you use can realize when you’re learning better or worse or what components about your learning are are affected by whether or not captions or something like that. I feel like that world is should be close to me. Richard Mayer: Right. And it should, yeah. Like if you’re I’m thinking of my wife, she likes close captions. Sometimes it helps her, I don’t know, understand the dialogue. So yeah, sometimes she doesn’t turn it on, or sometimes she leaves it on when it doesn’t have to be on. So it would be nice if it just said do you do you usually have closed caption on for this? Do you do you want it on now? I mean that that wouldn’t be too annoying I don’t think. So yeah, I I agree with you, it would be. I don’t think we’re that far from a world where. Umm. You know the system we’re interacting with will remember our preferences. Cecil: And that’s really interesting because we still have to worry about things like font size for the WCAG standards. But I mean, so much of this is changeable through your browser. So I’m wondering if we’re going to reach a point where, you know, they take more of that into consideration because basically they usually I feel like they don’t want you to rely on. Things that you can change in your browser.