Discussion on Principles of Effective Multimedia Instruction

Thomas Stinson
Created by Thomas Stinson on Jan 26, 2016 9:20 PM
I have been in education since 2010. Since I entered the profession, there has been a push to

integrate technology into classrooms. It does seem that students learn more effectively when

multimedia is used. Students in the information age have more technologically advanced tools to

explore, observe, participate, and present through the use of multimedia. These tools enable

students to learn by making the experiences with content in my opinion seem more authentic.

Moving forward multimedia will be driven by some of the design principles in the book, About

Face. Specially, that goal-directed interactions will reflect user mental models, and not

implementation models. I believe that this asserts that programs, software, and apps should be

flexible enough to adapt the intentions or desired outcome for the user.

During my elementary through high school years our multimedia consisted on videos, audio

recordings, and projections. It was not until my college years that I was exposed to multimedia

on a large scale. I must agree that media assisted with making more connections with the real

world and content knowledge. This is in my opinion the most important strength of multimedia

in education. It made a lot of the materials in Social Studies especially the conflicts, wars and

revolutions more relevant because of the action footage that we were watching in classes. Prior

to watching these real life occurrences, the multimedia learning consisted of verbal recounts or

collected literature. Also, in Science classes having the ability to view some of the specimens up

close thanks to attachments that enabled microscopes to connect to computers was vital to my

understanding of Biology. Before students were trying to identify organelles with pointers and

may have not been able to locate them prior to that particular attachment.
 According to the article applying the Science of Learning: Evidence Based Principles for the

Design of Multimedia Instruction by Richard Mayer, multimedia learning is learning from

words and pictures (761). While taking a college history course in 2009, I experienced the most

exposure to multimedia based learning. During this same time, I noticed that some of my class

mates that were not as interested in history had associating different events in time that

represented similar circumstances. In particular, there was a discussion where the professor tried

to shed light the fact that states rights were a reoccurring theme in American history. The articles

suggest that in the science of learning integration of incoming materials must relate to existing

knowledge. Also, with some of the presentations especially around government where more

lecture-based and a lot of the information presented stirred off course of the learning objective.

Reference
Cooper, A., Riemann, R. Cronin, D. & Noessel, C. (2014). About Face: The essentials of
interaction design. (4th ed.). Indianapolis, IN: John Wiley & Sons.

Mayer, R. (2008). Applying the science of learning: Evidence-based principles for the design of
multimedia instruction. American Psychology, 63 (8), 760-769.