Richard E. Mayer is an American educational psychologist at UC Santa Barbara whose research on multimedia learning established evidence-based principles for presenting instructional content.
Core ideas
- Multimedia learning: people learn better from words and pictures together than from words alone, but only when the combination is well designed. Poorly combined words and pictures increase cognitive load rather than reducing it [@mayer2009].
- Coherence principle: exclude extraneous material — interesting but irrelevant details, decorative images, background music. Each extraneous element competes for limited working memory.
- Segmenting principle: break complex lessons into learner-paced segments rather than presenting continuous streams. This allows learners to process one unit before moving to the next.
- Signaling principle: highlight essential material through headings, bold text, and structural cues. Signaling guides attention without adding extraneous content.
- Concrete before abstract: learners build understanding from examples to principles, not the reverse. Mayer’s research supports the vault’s convention of worked examples before formal definitions.
Notable works
- Multimedia Learning (2001; 2nd ed. 2009)
- Applying the Science of Learning (2010)
- The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (2005, editor)
Related
- John Sweller — cognitive load theory, which Mayer’s work complements and extends
- designing effective lessons — the vault’s lesson design applies Mayer’s principles