Richard E. Mayer

Richard Mayer’s research at UC Santa Barbara established a set of evidence-based principles for combining text, image, and narration so that learners build coherent mental models without overload.

¶Core ideas

• Multimedia principle: people learn better from words and pictures than from words alone
• Coherence principle: extraneous material hurts learning
• Modality and redundancy: narration with picture beats on-screen text with picture; both is worse than one

¶Key works

• Multimedia Learning (2001)
• Applying the Science of Learning (2010)