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0:07
Welcome to Speaking of Higher Ed, conversations on teaching and learning. I'm Andrew Everett. This podcast is produced by the center for Instructional Innovation at Augusta University. We released new episodes the third Wednesday of each month during spring and fall semesters. Please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast. And if you think of someone who might enjoy this episode and please share it as well. This is episode 22. Today, my colleague Arthur
0:34
Takahashi is speaking with Doctor Richard Mayer. Here's their conversation. Hi. Today I have the pleasure to introduce Doctor Richard E.Mayer, Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Doctor Mayer holds a PhD from the University of Michigan and a BA from Miami University. His groundbreaking research focuses on applying the science of learning to education, and particularly in the field of multimedia learning.
1:05
He's a past president of the American Psychological Associations Division of Educational Psychology, and the former editor of the journal Educational Psychologist. Doctor Mayer has received many awards, including the El Thorndyke Award, which honors career achievements in educational psychology, and also the James McKean Cattell Award, which recognizes a lifetime of outstanding contributions to applied psychological research. And I could go on and on
1:33
because you have a very extensive resume, but we have a limited time in this podcast. So I would just like to welcome you, Doctor Mayer. It is an honor to have you in our podcast. Oh, thank you very much. I really appreciate the invitation. I look forward to talking with you.
1:50
All right. So, to the first question, so you are the most cited educational psychologist in the world, according to Google Scholar. Last time that we looked, it was more than 200,000 citations, which is just an unbelievable number. And, both contemporary educational psychology and educational Psychology review list you as the number one most productive educational psychologist in the world. So here's my first question. So what guidance can you offer new college professors,
2:22
to help them excel as researchers and also educators, while also maintaining a healthy work life balance? I mean, that's that's a really great question. I and I don't hold myself up as, any expert on this, but I would say, you know what? What has kept me going is just curiosity, having, I think, just having burning questions that you want to address and, is where you start and try to figure out a methodology for how to study them. And then
2:56
hopefully, if you come up with some discoveries, figure out a way to tell the world about them. I, I feel, I certainly didn't set out to see how many citations I would have. I set out to answer research questions that interested me. And I think, you know, I feel really lucky to have a job where I can go into work every day and kind of pursue any research question that I find interesting. So that's what I try to do. And it's for me, it's just a lot of fun.
3:27
So, so my advice would be to, you know, follow your passion, follow your curiosity. And, because that's that's what sustains you in this field. And do you have specific days of the week that you allocate just for research or just to work on teaching? How do you, you know, organize your schedule. Just in terms of the practical side of things? I try to, like, segregate my day and my week into specific times. So for me, the mornings are for creative activity.
4:02
I try to write, for example, in the morning. If I can just get out 1 or 2 pages in the morning, I feel like I've done my work for the day. So I, I it's it's hard to not attend to all the other things that are, impinging on me, but I, I try to be pretty conscientious about having the morning for. Yeah. Creative work. And then, in the afternoon, I like to schedule my classes and my meeting with students. All the other committee meetings and things we have to do
4:38
responding to email. But of course, we all can't help ourselves. So sometimes I reward myself when I take a break. Then I can look at my email. Something like that. And I also try to do that for the week. Usually I try to do my academic work during the week and on the weekends. That's
4:57
when I do like reviewing for journals, because I think that's an obligation we all have. And I do like reviewing for journals. But it kind of is pretty time consuming. And it, so I, I try to just do that on the weekends. But I think, you know, setting up the day like that. And then I also try to have a daily, a little list of tasks I want to accomplish each day. And also, I have a more master list of tasks that I'm trying to deal with currently.
5:30
And then I have, probably the last person in the world who has a paper calendar that has also all the time sensitive obligations. I have.
5:40
So I guess bottom line is, being very well organized with your schedule, but also, perhaps very importantly, if not most importantly, following your passion. Exactly. And I think, you know, I think, it's a life work balance is really important. So I always have always tried to put my family first. And, you know, spend, spend time with them because that's really precious time. I think nobody's going to look back and say, I wish I would have published
6:09
one more chapter, but they might say, I wish I would have spent a little more time with my kids. So I, I think that's really important to keep in mind. All right. Okay. So, in this episode, we're going to be focusing on your role in helping create the revised Bloom's Taxonomy and also your lifetime work in the field of multimedia learning. And perhaps that's, where you're most well known. So let's start with the revised Bloom's Taxonomy.
6:37
And the first question that I have for you is this. So you were one of only three cognitive psychologists who worked on the book A taxonomy for learning, teaching and Assessing. And, this is more commonly known as the revised Bloom's Taxonomy. So could you discuss your role in, revising Benjamin Bloom's work? Sure. Well, that was quite an interesting, project. David Rothwell, who was the last surviving author of Bloom's Taxonomy, saved all his royalty money from that book,
7:13
which is substantial, and decided he was going to try to bring together a group of people to work on a revision. And his idea was, hey, it's been 35 years since that was, now 45, 45 years since that was published. And, you know, a lot has happened. Is there anything that needs to be revised? Is it even still relevant? So he he wanted us to have a discussion about that. So he brought together people that he thought would be good. I mean, it's all his choice. And we met
7:46
many times in Syracuse, which is where David Croft wall, was on the faculty at Syracuse University.
7:54
So we met there many times, sometimes in the dead of winter when there's snow everywhere. And we kind of just tried to work out what would it look like to revise Bloom's Taxonomy, and it kind of felt like you're trying to revise the Bible or something, and you don't want to change one word because it all just seems so. I mean, it's so historic and it has such a big influence. But David got us to think about things. He explained a lot of the controversies
8:22
that the original committee worked with and, it gave us a lot of backstory, which was really interesting. And, yeah, we work and we tried to work this out. And I mean, mainly we were trying to incorporate some of the advances in cognitive psychology and cognitive science or science of learning, whatever we want to call it, into the taxonomy. But what I found was, those folks who are pretty, had thought things through pretty well, and they, they had pretty good insights.
8:54
And in a way, they were kind of, a little bit revolutionary in the sense that they were trying to push the idea that transfer is an important instructional objective, and that meaningful learning and understanding is an important goal in education, not just retention. So really what I see in Bloom's Taxonomy is
9:18
the six levels. One of them is basically retention, but the other five are just different versions of transfer. And how do you, kind of identify these different kinds of transfer? Because in, in education or we're interested in, transfer retention is important of course, but we want students to be able to apply what they've learned in, in their lives. Absolutely. So, so what was the main goal of revising Bloom's Taxonomy?
9:50
I think we wanted to see if we thought the foundation was still relevant, given all the all the things that had happened. I mean, in the 50s, the main theories were still kind of behaviorist kind of theories of learning or they weren't. A lot of the theories were still based on animal learning and very contrived forms of learning. So they so David Crawford wanted to see, well, since that time we've had four and a half decades of research on more educationally relevant,
10:25
kinds of learning. Is there anything we should change? And we decided those six levels that they came up with still made sense. Maybe we needed to spell them out a little bit. But what we added mainly was, some of the cognitive processes and the kinds of knowledge that are involved because they didn't they didn't really those ideas really weren't there when they were working on their book. But looking at, procedural knowledge, declarative knowledge, metacognitive knowledge
11:01
and seeing how those would be those are different, qualitatively different kinds of learning outcomes. So we kind of tried to basically make a matrix where we crossed the original six, levels with these kind of cognitive processes or kinds of knowledge. So that's my knowledge, which wasn't the original taxonomy, but part of the cognitive domain. That's why that was, set apart as a different dimension in the revised taxonomy, because it was qualitatively different. Yeah, yeah.
11:36
And the idea was, you know, you can you can take each of the six, of the original levels and look at it. How does it apply to procedural learning? How does it apply to declarative learning. How does it apply to metacognitive and so on. So I don't think we really changed Bloom's Taxonomy that much. We just tried to give it a a little bit of an update in terms of, what we know in cognitive science.
12:06
Okay. And, I have heard people called the revised taxonomy a model and in some cases, even the theory of learning.
12:15
So, you know, in your opinion, how would you define this revised taxonomy, perhaps in just a couple of sentences? What would you say this taxonomy actually is? I think it was. It is. And it was intended just to be a framework for classifying learning objectives. That's that's the way I've always looked at it. And that's why we kind of changed the title of the book a little bit, saying it taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing.
12:42
We're trying to spell out what are the different kinds of learning objectives you can have. So these are kind of high level categories for different kinds of learning objectives. So that's not really a theory of of learning or assessing or teaching. But it it is a framework for thinking about learning objectives. So if you're teaching the ideas, if all your objectives are just at the,
13:08
you know, retention level, you might think about some of these other levels too. So it's kind of a good reminder to you when you teach and also when you develop tests that, some of the items maybe should look at some of these, more higher, higher level transfer kinds of objectives. So, so I, I see it mainly as, yeah, just a taxonomy of different types of learning objectives. Okay. And, so for more practical advice for college faculty, you mentioned,
13:43
you know, in the case of, teaching writing instruction, how have you used the revised taxonomy in your own teaching and, how would you suggest the college professors use this taxonomy? You know, I, I, I think the, the main
14:01
kind of theme, underlying theme of Bloom's Taxonomy is, that we should be teaching for transfer in addition to teaching for retention. It's obvious how to teach for retention and how to test for retention. And if you look at most assessments, they're kind of more heavily loaded on seeing how well students can remember what they were taught. But it's also important to teach for transfer. So to me, that is the message I get out of it for my teaching to remember.
14:32
We want students to be able to take this material and then apply it. Think about it. So if we have a theory, that we're talking about and we talk about a research study, we might ask, well, according to this theory, what do you think the outcome should be or according to that theory, what do you think the outcomes should be that gets that's kind of a higher level of questioning than just saying, well, what did they find in that study? So I think it just reminds us to,
15:02
you know, focus on, the transfer side of learning and not just the retention side.
15:09
And, that kind of leads me to the next two questions, because, the next two questions are really about the criticisms, perhaps the two most popular criticisms of, the revised Bloom's Taxonomy. So the first one is, one of the main criticisms is that the revised taxonomy, the cognitive domain is a cumulative hierarchy. And that means that you need to master the lower categories before you can master the more complex ones. And this idea has been represented by,
15:40
this pyramid, right where, the, the lowest level is, remember, so at the bottom and then the most complex category is, create, which is at the top, right. But in the book itself, it taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing. You and your coauthors specifically mention, and it's in the appendix, but you specifically mentioned that the cognitive domain is not a cumulative hierarchy. So could you perhaps talk about, that and address this criticism? Sure.
16:14
Because this was an issue that, we spent a lot of time on. Also an issue that David Crosswell said the original committee spent a lot of time on. So he he was very interested in what we thought about it compared to how his original committee thought about it. And, you know, I think it's I think it's a really interesting question.
16:40
I don't think the, you know, the framework is precise enough to really, become cumulative because you really have to we need to specify a little bit more about what kind of knowledge we're talking about for each of those levels. And I, I'm not sure the field has been able to do that yet. So, I think we took a I mean, I personally, I would take a more conservative approach to this, or maybe more agnostic approach at this point. I, I don't see how it's how it's cumulative.
17:16
I don't know exactly how to put those in order. It's probably depends on the specific topic. Maybe for a specific topic, you could do a task analysis and see what the levels are. But it's hard to do that in general.
17:35
So the verdict here is that it is not a cumulative hierarchy. At not yet. Okay. Not not until we can kind of conceptualize it a little with a little more specificity. All right. So, in this case, then, would you say that we should not use the pyramid, to represent the revised Bloom's Taxonomy? I mean, I don't have any objection to using it, but just with the understanding that. Yeah, there's kind of a feeling the the, each higher level is, involving a little bit more, transfer,
18:16
but I think they're kind of qualitatively different. So it's hard to talk about the amount of transfer. So. Yeah, I mean, I don't object to the pyramid, but I,
18:26
I wouldn't say that that that shows that there's, some kind of cumulative thing going on. Okay. So you mentioned, the idea of transfer, which is what education should be about. Yes. That leads me to the next criticism of, the revised taxonomy that I have seen, in that, and it's, it's the criticism that the taxonomy does not represent how people learn. However, you seem to address this criticism in an essay that you wrote in 2002.
19:00
In this essay titled rote Versus Meaningful Learning. And you wrote this for the theory into, into practice journal. So could you discuss that? And when I say that, I mean the fact that the revised taxonomy actually does take into account the way people learn.
19:19
Oh, thanks for your amazing scholarship and digging up these papers. Well, you know, I think this distinction between meaningful and rote learning is, is a fundamental issue in our field. It's been a fundamental issue in both psychology and education, you know, for more than 100 years. Like is there a difference? But what is the difference? Is there a difference between learning by rote and learning by understanding? And so that is an idea that's really driven
19:52
personally, my research and my scholarship all all these years, I kind of want to understand what is meaningful learning, to kind of understand what rote learning is, but what is meaningful learning, what what has to happen in the learner's mind when when they're engaging in meaningful learning. And I went to some meaningful learning outcome look like. So I think Bloom's Taxonomy is trying to answer, what does a meaningful learning outcome look like
20:16
by trying to figure out ways to assess it or describe
20:21
a meaningful learning outcomes. I don't think the taxonomy itself is a is a theory of learning, but it certainly has fostered theories of learning. I think my own work in in Multimedia Learning theory is an attempt to explain how meaningful learning works. How do how do you get people to do well on transfer tests? Because I think that's a a driving question for me. So even though I think Bloom's Taxonomy is not specifically a theory of learning, I think it did
20:54
kind of foster theories of learning, and it kind of helped our field shift from theories of learning that were pretty much just wrote rote kind of learning, having like one, one idea in your memory and you retrieve that kind of thing versus more meaningful kind of learning where you're assimilating information to your existing knowledge and you're constructing knowledge representations. I think that's the kind of theory you need to be able to have the kind of,
21:27
learning outcomes that are described in Bloom's Taxonomy. And, in that essay specifically, you mentioned that the top five, categories of the cognitive domain. So starting with understanding, they're all about transfer, right. Just remember just the bottom one is really rote learning. That's right. That that's the way I look at it. So I feel like that original committee was kind of doing something, a little revolutionary, as I mentioned, in trying to get us beyond thinking
22:00
that our goal is to just help students remember, but it's also to help students transfer. Okay. So if we are using, Bloom's Taxonomy to revise the Bloom's Taxonomy, as instructors, again, as you mentioned, rote learning, so remember, is important, but we should aim for any of the other five categories. Exactly, exactly. And you have to be able to remember the information so you can apply it, but remembering it's just the first step.
22:30
All right.
22:31
So the top five are really, the goal for design instruction. I think most educators would agree with that, that what we're trying to do is help our students be able to use what they've learned in new situations. All right. So, now let's, switch to, talking about your, life work, which is multimedia learning. And speaking of meaningful learning, you mentioned in a more recent essay titled The Past, present and Future of the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning.
23:01
That there's one question that has driven your, efforts as a researcher for the past 40 years. So could you, discuss that with our listeners? What the question is and how, that particular question has guided your research for, you know, the past four decades. Sure. I've kind of alluded to that, I guess, but
23:23
it's a question I developed as a graduate student. It's like I was curious about how can you teach people in ways so they can take what they've learned and use it in new situations? It's a very simple question. I thought as a first year graduate student, I should be able to have that figured out by the time I graduate, but it actually has occupied me for all these years. Because it's it's a very it's a complex question in a lot of ways. It's simple in a lot of ways,
23:52
but it's complex in a lot of ways. So that's really the question of how do you teach for transfer and what is what is how do you teach for understanding? What is understanding? But what happens, when students understand something and how can you promote that understanding. So that's that's kind of a question. That's get gets me going.
24:15
Yeah. It seems like that question has guided your work with the revised taxonomy but also in multimedia learning. Right, exactly. Yes. It's just it's just, multimedia learning was just like a domain where I could try and pursue that. And we're funding agencies that would give me grants.
24:35
So, you know, if you can discuss with our listeners, explain to them, if they don't know, about your famous, cognitive, cognitive theory of multimedia learning. So what is this theory and what are you attempting to do with it? I'm mainly trying to understand how people learn from, instructional materials that involve both words and pictures. And by pictures, I mean any kind of graphic,
25:03
or including video. And so most instructional materi
25:11
So that as a starting point, I look to see, okay, what does we've had a lot of research in the area of cognitive science. What what are any takeaways that would be relevant if you were trying to design, multimedia lessons. And, and I came up with three really, big contributions or principles from cognitive science. One is what I would call, the dual processing principle. And that is the idea that humans have separate information processing channels for,
25:45
for words and pictures that, we process, verbal material in a different part of the brain than visual material. We represent verbal material differently than visual material. Those channels communicate with each other, but, but they're separate and they operate in qualitatively different ways. So that's dual channels. Another characteristic of human, of the human,
26:12
we'll say, information processing system is that we have a very limited working memory. So information can come in to us through our eyes and ears. And when we pay attention to it, it goes to our working memory. But we only can pay attention to just a few things in each channel at any one time. So just a few visual elements and a few, maybe a few words of, from the the verbal stream that's coming in. So that is telling us we can fill the screen
26:42
with all kinds of information for students to see, but they're only really going to be able to attend to a very small part of that at any one time. So that's those are two kind of constraints on how we process information that, instructional designers, need to think about. And then the third is what I call active processing. And this is the idea that meaningful learning depends on the student engaging in appropriate cognitive processing during learning.
27:11
So it's all got to do with
27:14
what is the learner doing with that incoming information. You have to be able to figure out what to pay attention to. You have to mentally organize that into some kind of coherent, representation. And then you'll have to related to your relevant prior knowledge. So these, these kind of processes, take a lot of cognitive resource, but our working memory is limited. So we have to figure out how can we prime those processes for meaningful learning in a system
27:44
that is so limited in capacity. That's that's the challenge I think of in struction. So that that's kind of was my starting point. And then I kind of honed in a little bit more on the active learning side of this. So, try to figure out what is meaningful learning, what happens when you engage in meaningful learning. So these three processes that I just mentioned, which I call selecting, organizing and integrating, I think these are the processes that go on when you understand
28:13
a lesson. Selecting means attending to the relevant part of the lesson, being able to figure out what's important and what's less important. Because I think a lot of students kind of think everything's equally important. I just need to memorize everything that's being said. But but we can't do that and we don't have the capacity to do that. So we have to focus in on the most important part of the lesson. So selecting is one part learned.
28:39
And there's a lot of research on attentional controls. Students vary in their ability to control their attention. And that turns out to be a really important skill. Then we have organizing. That means once we get the information in our working memory, we have to kind of build some kind of structure that connects it together. So we have some kind of coherent representation that makes sense to us. So that's kind of a vague, statement.
29:04
But I think the idea is we are structure builders. We're not tape recorders. So that organizing, element is, is an important step. And then lastly, integrating means we need to integrate our visual and verbal representations and also connect them with relevant prior knowledge from long term memory. So we have to search for long term memory, find things we know that are relevant to the lesson we're learning, and bring them into working memory and connect them up.
29:34
So those three plus processes of selecting, organizing and integrating are what enable us to have a meaningful learning outcome that would result in transfer. That's kind of, I hope that all made sense. Yes. No, absolutely. Now you don't have to read a 200 page book.
29:53
Well, you know, you mention, your, your book, multimedia learning. So in the third edition, you talk about how, you know, your lifetime work in multimedia learning led to this one principle, which is called the multimedia principle. And can you explain what that principle is? And, you know what the implications are for instructional design and for college professors. Sure. I kind of stumbled on to this in the 80s. I mean, I, I had been studying
30:25
advance organizers, which is material you put before a lesson that kind of helps people have some context to assimilate the material to. And, and I and I was I did a bunch of little things with trying to improve learning from tech text based lessons, but one thing I stumbled on was if you add illustrations, it seemed to really help people. So if you have text that explains something like how a bicycle tire pump works, for example, was one lesson.
30:54
It's fine, it has all the information there. But if you also add a diagram that actually depicts what the text is saying, that greatly improved people's ability to remember and also to transfer to new situations. So that's kind of what got me started on the multimedia principle, which I would just say is state of saying people learn better from words and pictures than from words alone. I think in education we traditionally use words, you know, we we talk, we give lectures,
31:23
or we have textbooks that are very text, heavy. But if we had, the right kind of graphics to it, we can I think we can greatly improve people's understanding. So the multimedia principle is just very simply, people learn better from words and graphics than from just words alone.
31:45
I guess one important definition here is the word multimedia. Because, usually when we say that, at least in my experience, people are thinking of technology, the medium. Right? So videos or animations, but in your research you use that word in a different way. Yes. That's a really good point. It's, it's the wrong word. I started out using the wrong word and one paper, and then I was stuck with it for the rest of my life because it's really multimodal.
32:11
That's what I should have said, because, there are different modes of representation. There's like a verbal mode and a visual mode of representing information. And I'm saying it's good to represent information both in a verbal mode and a visual mode. So you're absolutely right. I'm not looking at different kinds of technology or something like that when I say multimedia, but most people, you're right, would think of yeah, it means different kinds of delivery devices.
32:41
And in your research in this book as well, multimedia learning, the third edition, you also list an additional 14 principles of multimedia learning. And, you mentioned that, you know, with the multimedia principle, it's all about learning better from words and pictures and, so those two modes, but it's only if you add the right type of graphic. So you mention that. So, so it's not just using both words and visuals or pictures, but there's a way to do that.
33:15
So and that's what your 14 principles touch on. Right. What would you say are perhaps the top 2 or 3 principles that, in your experience, have really helped college faculty improve their instruction? And their instructional materials? You know, without a whole lot of change. I think you make a really good point there by saying, yeah, the multimedia principle. That's a good start. But it's not saying any graphic is helpful. We have to figure out what makes a helpful graphic
33:50
and also what makes a helpful text. How should we design the text and the graphics? So yeah, that's how I've spent the last four decades now many decades trying to figure out, but I'll take just a step up from what are the best principles, because there's really like three objectives for these principles. One is what I would call reducing extraneous processing, because I think when you present information to students, you know, in a, lesson,
34:20
you know, on screen lesson or, lecture or anything like that, it's very easy to overwhelm them with too much. Or if you have poor instructional design, they waste a lot of their cognitive resources just trying to figure out what's going on. So the, first idea is let's reduce extraneous processing. We don't want people to engage in cognitive processing that does not support the instructional goal. So one principle is what I call the coherence principle,
34:49
which is in lots, lots of books on how to teach, which is keep it simple, don't put in things that are not directly relevant to the theme of the lesson. If it's not supporting the instructional objective, you don't need it in the lesson. So, so the idea sometimes less is more, people learn better if you focus on what your point is. So that's the coherence principle. Kind of weed out extraneous material, both words and graphics. We tend to make graphics way too complicated
35:21
and pretty with all kinds of colors and details, and sometimes just a simple line drawing conveys the idea a lot better. So that's the coherence principle that is in support of
35:33
minimizing extraneous processing. And there are other ones too, like signaling, which is kind of pointing out the important material. The second kind of end goal is managing, essential processing. And so, here the idea is, sometimes we you can only simplify a lesson. So far, the material itself might be complicated. So we can't like take out part of the lesson just because it's complicated. So if we're trying to teach something that's complicated and help people get that into
36:06
their working memory, what can we do? So I call that managing essential processing. One thing we can do is use what I call the segmenting principle, which is to break a lesson into smaller parts and just go part by part by part. I see a lot of the lessons where people like will present, like a whole graphic of a whole system with all these different parts to it, and then go back and explain each part. But that's kind of overwhelming. It would be better,
36:33
I think, to just start with the first little part, make sure people understand that, then add the next part, then add the next part, and so on. That's the segmenting principle. So and then the third is what I call fostering generative processing. So even if we design a perfect lesson, if students aren't motivated to try and make sense out of it,
36:53
it's not going to work. So how do you how do you motivate students to exert the effort to make sense out of a lesson?
37:03
That's what fostering generative processing is about. So one way to do this that we discovered that I was quite, surprised about was when I call the personalization principle, this is just using conversational language like first and second person words like you and I and we, rather than just third person formal presentations that improves learning. We also have the positivity principle, which is if the instructor uses positive gestures, positive facial expression, positive voice
37:37
that actually makes students feel more positive, but it also improves their learning outcomes. So those are two. And then there are generative learning activities where we can ask students to engage in activities during learning, like trying to explain something to someone else or summarize what they've just learned. So those are all techniques that I think are fostering generative processing. So that makes sense. Yes. Now this this is great. One of the things that
38:06
you mention, in, in some of your publications, is the importance of considering prior knowledge. And you kind of touched a little bit on that, because it's all about integrating the mental, models. Right. The verbal and, the visual models with prior knowledge. So, can you discuss a little bit about that, or, the importance of prior knowledge for instructional designers and for instructors designing structural materials? Yeah, I think that's a really important point
38:37
because we can have perfect instruction, but we have to think of a for who?
38:43
I think you have to start with knowing who is your audience. What is your audience already know? What are they? What are they interested in? What do they care about? So that I think trying to have some kind of model of the user or the learner is important when you're designing instruction, because you do it differently when you're working, let's say with little kids who are just starting out versus more experienced learners, for example. So we know that
39:11
really meaningful learning involves assimilating incoming information to your existing knowledge. And this this is a basic concept we've had in psychology for a long time, although it really hasn't become popular until maybe, you know, the second half of, the 20th century. But I talked about this, Bartlett, who was a British psychologist, talked about this possible and his theories of, advance organizers talked about it and a lot of mental philosophers.
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So the fundamental thing we're trying to help people do is connect what's coming in with what they already know. So we need to have some understanding of what they already know. If if they don't have relevant prior knowledge, we have to sort of make sure we provide that somehow. Or if they do have it, we need to somehow activated to remind them that they have it. That's why I think graphics can sometimes do that. So I, I think, you know, prior knowledge is really
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at the heart of learning because people get it. People can be presented with the same lesson, but if they assimilated to different prior knowledge, their learning outcomes are going to be quite different.
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So, what would be your approach or perhaps your recommendation suggestion to college faculty when they're designing instruction? And, when they're thinking about their students prior knowledge? So what would be the approach there? You know, we talk about this a lot with younger learners, but I think it also applies to, college students, because most of the courses they're taking, they're still novices, especially one of the gateway courses. I think we need to,
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be a lot more kind of concrete with what we're talking about. Maybe use, metaphors, use concrete examples. So they can relate it to their prior knowledge. Even concrete manipulatives like in chemistry, we use our little balls and sticks to kind of represent, different, different elements. If, if we can kind of make things more concrete, use, metaphors. I think that helps people understand things. So if we're trying to explain Ohm's law,
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we might relate it to the idea of water flow and pipes. It's not a great metaphor, but thinking of electrons flowing in wire wires, it's hard to conceptualize. So I think trying to find some kind of metaphor or some kind of concrete example is, is how we can help tap into people's prior knowledge. And using concrete objects, having people actually manipulate things, it's something you think about you'd want to do with first graders, but I think it also helps with college students.
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And, when it comes to prior knowledge, it seems like, the latest research that you have done and your colleagues have done multimedia learning and, multimedia learning principles, you have found that prior knowledge could be a boundary condition there. So could you explain what a boundary condition is and how prior knowledge in this case is a boundary condition? Sure. That's a really, really, really good point because we've come up with these, so-called principles.
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I mean, I think I have to be pretty humble about them. I mean, they're based mainly on short term lab studies. We're not sure how well they work in in the real world. There have been some classroom studies that use them that get the same results. So that makes me happy. But they're not going to always work all the time. They're not like they're not like laws, that are never going to be broken. We have to figure out when do they apply and when don't they apply.
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And we should be able to come up with an explanation for why they would. So a lot of the principles apply. Better for beginners, for novices, let's say. Then for more experienced learners. So things like you know,
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signaling you like pointing out what you should be looking at on the screen. So maybe there's a voice describing things. There's a graphic on the screen. Signaling would mean somehow we're like pointing to the things the narrator is talking about. An experienced person probably can figure that out on their own, but a novice is going to have more trouble. So most of the instructional devices that I talk about are probably going to help, low prior knowledge
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learners, more than high prior knowledge learners. Kelly, Slava Kelly got, calls that, expertise reversal effect. So the techniques that are helpful for novices
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really aren't helpful for experts and vice versa. Experts probably do better when they have more freedom to explore. Novices probably need more structure and guidance
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from that. And that makes sense. So when it comes to, if you are an instructor in your teaching, of course, in college. Right. How how do you categorize your students? How would you define okay? My students are probably novice learners, or my students are probably expert learners. I pretty much assume they're novice learners. There's going to be a few who are more expert, more fun to talk to. But, I think most of our students are novice learners, especially
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in the gateway courses in each of our disciplines. Maybe if, you know, I'm teaching a psychology course and I'm dealing with students in their fourth year and they've taken a lot of other courses, okay, there are certain things they understand that they wouldn't have understood in their first year or so. I feel they're a little more expert and they understand what an experiment is and things like that. But in general, I think we're probably safe.
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Assuming most students are more at the novice level. I don't think it hurts experts to be taught at that level, because
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experts seem to be able to learn, no matter how bad the instruction is. But novices need more thoughtful instruction.
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So, for college faculty in general, if they follow your principles, given this boundary condition, they're probably going to be okay. Yes, I think so. I think assume I've never gone wrong, assuming my students don't know that much. All right. But so, in some of your publications, you have acknowledged the role of social and emotional processing as well as metacognitive factors in learning. Are there factors playing a role in the way you think about multimedia learning?
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And you kind of touched a little bit on that when you talked about the principles for fostering generative processing. But, could you discuss that a little bit? Sure. So I mean, this is a theory that's been evolving for a long time. And I have been trying to think about I mean, it's very heavily focused on cognitive processes like selecting, organizing and integrating. But we all I mean, I'm very much aware that there are affective processes involved in learning.
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How you feel about the lesson, how you feel about the instructor, you know, it has a big effect. And then also social processes, just your relationship with the instructor. You're feeling that the instructor cares about you. You know, it plays a role. So I we've been trying to figure out how can we study that and how can we manipulate that. How can we maximize positive affect and, feeling a social connection so that that's been something we've been trying for the last maybe
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decade now, trying to figure out how can we incorporate affective and social, processing into our, our model. And one, one thing we can do to maybe improve, affective processing. I alluded to the positivity principle. So using things like, outward gesture, positive facial expression, appealing voice, those are things that push people that make people feel happier. And if we have like, graphics, using appealing colors, even, sometimes putting little facial expressions
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on some of the objects in the lesson itself.
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Can improve learning. We call that emotional design. So designing the graphics of the evoke positive emotion, those are we found have been helpful in learning and in terms of social connection, things like voice. And these gestures, I think, also influence students feeling of social connection with the instructor. So there are surveys to look at. How well do you feel the instructor is trying to help me learn how engaging is the instructor? How credible is the instructor?
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Having that kind of connection, is related to, learning better. So we've we're we're starting to try to tread into this domain I'm not as familiar with of affective and social processing.
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And also, in your publications you also mentioned metacognitive, skills. So are you trying to incorporate that as well into your research? I think that's a big missing part in our theory. Both. Where does metacognition come in? Where does motivation come in? Both of those I think, have to be incorporated into this theory or we have to understand like, how do you know what processes to use? How do you assess how well you're learning
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and how do you orchestrate all the, the possible processes you can use so that all comes under the heading of metacognition? So I think that's a really important thing to study. And hopefully to, train students to be better at controlling their cognitive processing. And of course, motivation is it is a huge field in educational psychology. And, we need to figure out how to, motivate our students. Maybe ask them what? What are you hoping to get out of this lesson
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or what are you hoping to get out of this course? How do you see this course relating to your goals in life? So just getting people to be able to see what they're learning is related to their interests and goals is an important step. So fortunately, there's a lot more work to do.
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All right. So, now I would like to transition to our last question, which is the continuing the conversation question. And, so you have mentioned in some of your publications that the cognitive theory of multimedia learning continues to evolve. Can you give us perhaps a glimpse into the research that you are working on right now that may impact what your theory and model perhaps look like in the future? I kind of alluded to that a little bit.
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We've been working on trying to add, affective and social processing to this model to see how it fits. And we finally we have like a large enough database that we can do some, path analysis modeling to see. So these different models of little components we think are involved to see how they are related to each other. So I mean, the model we're working in is what we call the cognitive affective model of e-learning, which starts with the idea that,
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the lesson primes an affective response in learners. So if it's positive, that's good. Then that primes a social response, which is their feeling of connection with the instructor that primes their motivation to to engage deeply with the material. And that results in a better, transfer test performance. So we have this little five step model that we've been,
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trying to test in various ways. And like I said, we now have enough data that we can, like, see if we can fit a path model to that. And we seem to be able to do that. So that makes me feel like, okay, maybe we can add these components to our model.
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And we're always looking at new technologies to work with. So we've gotten a little bit involved with virtual reality to see how should you design learning experiences in VR. Not that I, I mean, I don't think technology causes learning. It's the instructional method that causes learning. But VR is kind of qualitatively different than some other media. So we want to know how should we design learning experiences in VR, or especially to overcome
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all the distraction that's involved but still maintains the motivation, motivational qualities of VR? So that's kind of been a new area for us. And I think we've also started to look at, cognitive neuroscience measures of learning to see if that's going to tell us anything, especially about cognitive load. So can we use,
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EEG measures or even just,
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biometric measures like heart rate. Can that inform what we're trying to learn? And we're using eye tracking as probably our most important technology because that tells us where what people are attending to on the screen. So we have that kind of technology side of it too. So we do have a lot of, research going on at the moment. Yeah, we always have too many ideas, but that's that's good.
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But always going back to that one question, right. How, how we learn how we can achieve meaningful learning. And I would say I mean, I feel over the course of my career, not me personally, but our field has made a lot of progress and understanding how people learn. When I started as a grad student, I don't think we had very good theories of of human learning. I mean, maybe animal learning, but not human learning. And I think today we have a,
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the science of learning has progressed, and we know a lot about how learning works. And I think what I would call the science of instruction has really progressed. Also, we know how to foster learning. So I'm very optimistic that we're making progress and we're really going to make more progress in the future. All right. Doctor Mayer do you have anything to add? I know we've talked, about a lot of, topics here, but is there anything that I didn't ask you
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that perhaps you'd like to, make a comment on?
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Let me think. I mean, I guess one one thing I would comment on is one thing I didn't realize when I started, in this field, was what, a team effort. You know, our work is. I mean, I've just had so much, good fortune and being able to work with amazing graduate students, colleagues and colleagues from all over the world.
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And what we what we do in our research is always a team effort that also involves a team. But I think in our larger field, I feel like it's a team effort for all kind of working towards the same goal and our our work, our work influences each other. So that's one thing I didn't realize when I started. I thought it was more like, oh, I'll do this, but that's not how it works. It's, very much collaborative. So teamwork is important in the life of a researcher
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and educator. Definitely. All right, Dr. Mayer thank you so much again for this conversation. It was enlightening. And again, I'm very, humbled and honored to be able to, speak with you. I thank you. I appreciate the invitation. Thank you so much. The conversation continues on our Facebook page at facebook.com/a u g c AI. Please contribute your thoughts on today's topic and other episodes. You can find more information on our show page at augusta.edu/innovation.
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Please take a moment to rate, review, subscribe and share this podcast. Speaking of Higher Ed is produced by the center for Instructional Innovation at Augusta University.
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