Richard E. Mayer, professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has actively pursued research in applying the science of learning to education since the early 1970s. With over 500 publications including 30 books ("Richard Mayer," 2015), Mayer is considered the most highly productive and influential educational psychologist of our time (Patterson-Hazley, 2013). His endeavors have earned him the prestigious E. L. Thorndike Career Achievement Award, the Sylvia Scribner Award for outstanding research in the field of learning and instruction, and the Award for Distinguished Contributions of Applications of Psychology to Education and Training from the American Psychological Association. …show more content…
The first is on the influence of instructional strategies, especially as they relate to desired learning outcomes and cognitive processing. It is in this area that Mayer started researching and publishing at the beginning of his career, and he continues to make significant contributions to the related knowledge base. The second, though more prominent, area of research for Mayer centers on multimedia learning. He has developed the cognitive theory of multimedia learning, and over time his research on the relationship between text and pictures has moved from paper-based to computer-based lessons, and is now shifting to include computer games as well. The following section provides a synthesis of Mayer’s research and key contributions in each of these …show more content…
The first experiment used a 2 x 2 between-subjects design with one factor as the presence or absence of on-screen text during narration, and the other factor as the presence or absence of extraneous details in the lesson. For both conditions, participants who received no on-screen text and no extraneous detail performed better on recall and transfer test items than participants in the other groups. The second experiment expanded on the use of on-screen text and presented learners with either a text-based, on-screen summary of the narration, word-for-word text of the narration, or no text. This experiment found no difference between participants with a summary or word-for-word text, and that participants with no text outperformed both groups on recall and transfer items. Findings from both of these experiments support the redundancy effect and call for the removal of information that requires students to use their visual channel to process pictorial information and text at the same time. Experiments 3 and 4 focused on the coherence effect and studied participant performance on recall and transfer items when irrelevant videos were added throughout (Experiment 3) or at the beginning (Experiment 4) of a multimedia lesson. In both