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.
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I agree that when it comes to teaching concepts, less is better. Students don’t tend to do well with information overload.
Hey there! I was also reading about it and wondering why it is that our brain is better off integrating illustrations and narration (w/o background sounds) than with animations. I once hear din a Neuroscience class that 30% of our brain is devoted to seeing. One would wonder why audio has such a strong effect when we are better wired for seeing than fro hearing. It definately has to do with rducing the cognitive load but I wonder how it really works.
Take care! Good lick w/ your revised lectures..