A Cognitive Approach to Instructional Design for Multimedia Learning

Aimed at both newcomers to online learning as well as experienced multimedia developers, this paper addresses the issue of how to avoid unproductive multimedia instructional practices and employ more effective cognitive strategies. Baddeley’s model of working memory and Paivio’s dual coding theory suggest that humans process information through dual channels, one auditory and the other visual. This, combined with Sweller’s Theory of Cognitive Load and Anderson’s ACT-R cognitive architecture, provides a convincing argument for how humans learn, which leads to the question of how multimedia instruction can be designed to maximize learning. Cognitive theory and frameworks like Mayer’s Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning provide empirical guidelines that may help us to design multimedia instruction more effectively. Mayer argues that the best way to present multimedia instruction is through visual graphics and informal voice narration, which takes advantage of both verbal and visual working memories without overloading one or the other.