Revising the Redundancy Principle in Multimedia Learning

• Published in: Journal of educational psychology Vol. 100; no. 2; pp. 380 - 386
• Main Authors: Mayer, Richard E, Johnson, Cheryl I
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Psychological Association 01.05.2008
• Subjects: College Students; Control Groups; Critical Viewing; Educational Experiments; Educational Psychology; Educational Technology; Epistemology; Experimental Groups; Intermode Differences; Multimedia Instruction; Multimedia Materials; Redundancy; Retention (Psychology); Transfer of Training; Visual Stimuli
• ISSN: 0022-0663
• DOI: 10.1037/0022-0663.100.2.380

College students viewed a short multimedia PowerPoint presentation consisting of 16 narrated slides explaining lightning formation (Experiment 1) or 8 narrated slides explaining how a car's braking system works (Experiment 2). Each slide appeared for approximately 8-10 s and contained a diagram along with 1-2 sentences of narration spoken in a female voice. For some students (the redundant group), each slide also contained 2-3 printed words that were identical to the words in the narration, conveyed the main event described in the narration, and were placed next to the corresponding portion of the diagram. For other students (the nonredundant group), no on-screen text was presented. Results showed that the group whose presentation included short redundant phrases within the diagram outperformed the nonredundant group on a subsequent test of retention (d = 0.47 and 0.70, respectively) but not on transfer. Results are explained by R. E. Mayer's (2001, 2005a) cognitive theory of multimedia learning, in which the redundant text served to guide the learner's attention without priming extraneous processing. (Contains 3 tables, 3 figures and 1 footnote.)