Multimedia Learning

For hundreds of years verbal messages such as lectures and printed lessons have been the primary means of explaining ideas to learners. Although verbal learning offers a powerful tool, this book explores ways of going beyond the purely verbal. Recent advances in graphics technology and information technology have prompted new efforts to understand the potential of multimedia learning as a means of promoting human understanding. In Multimedia Learning, Second Edition, Richard E. Mayer examines whether people learn more deeply when ideas are expressed in words and pictures rather than in words alone. He reviews 12 principles of instructional design that are based on experimental research studies and grounded in a theory of how people learn from words and pictures. The result is what Mayer calls the cognitive theory of multimedia learning, a theory first developed in the first edition of Multimedia Learning and further developed in The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning.

Richard E. Mayer is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has served since 1975. He is the author of Multimedia Learning (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (Cambridge University Press, 2005). In 2008 he received the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Contributions of Applications of Psychology to Education and Training Award.