5130: Mayer, Medina, Phluff?

As I read through our reading in Mayer’s Multi-Media Learning this week, I struggled with some of the ideas he presented. This was because they seemed directly opposed to some ideas that really struck a chord with me in the Medina readings. The idea I am talking about is using pictures, sounds, and stories to enhance learning. Now I was excited about reading Medina’s work because he talked about the idea of adding “handles” so students could retrieve the information from their brains easier if it was encoded in more than one mode. When I got to Chapter 7 in Mayer, he shared studies showing that additional graphics, sounds or stories actually detracted from student learning both in retention and transfer tests. What? These two ideas seemed so opposed to each other. One reason I liked reading Medina is that he uses stories to get the ideas across. Well, the more I thought about it and after reading the discussion on it in the eCollege shell, it is making a little more sense to me now. The idea of adding handles and ways to get the information is to use actual relevant stories and pictures. Mayer used an example of talking about how lightning works and having a story of people getting injured by lightning. While I can see where a connection could be drawn, the story added unnecessary details that he said could cause the students to link information about the causes of lightning to a framework where people get injured by lightning. So the point is to keep the graphics and other information relevant to the actual information being learned. And as for more “handles,” adding the graphics showing air moving and particles being charged along with the text describing what is happening will give students verbal and pictoral representations that they can draw upon to remember the information. As Joni says, it is Tufte’s phluff. You don’t want to add extra stuff that will get in the way of learning rather than enhance it.