When “less is more”

This week I read through Richard E. Mayer’s Multi-media Learning chapter on the “Coherence Principle.”  In his principle, he says that “less is more”.  I’ve been struggling a bit recently in my trigonometry classes keeping the student’s attention when lecturing about graphing trigonometric functions such as Sine, Cosine, Tangent, etc.  I watch the students stay with me for a while, but then, I see most of them loose interest.  Some of them start nodding off, others start working on the homework assignments and then others are in la-la land.  Only a few stay with me in the lecture. 

 After reading Mayer’s Coherence Principle, I am starting to second guess some of my teaching methods.  I’ve been wondering if they are in overload (Mayer’s limited capacity principle)  or if I loose them because they are lost in the concepts. I think it may be a combination of the two reasons.  I really haven’t figured out how to present this graphing information differently, because there is a lot of material to cover, but I know I need to figure out a different way. 

 Although Mayer’s principles and concepts are designed for multimedia learning, I am finding that they can also apply to other forms of learning.