This guide is available as a Word document or PDF. Images can be effective for explaining concepts that cannot be described adequately in words alone (Ainsworth & Loizou, 2003). The terms “image,” “picture,” and “graphic” in this post refer to static visual representations that include, but are not limited to, drawings, photographs, microscope images, and…
This guide is available as a Word document or PDF. Popular instructional videos have such different styles, and there is no consensus in research about how to make the most effective instructional videos (Renkl, 2021). Videos can differ in whether or not we can see the instructor, presenting text as spoken and/or printed, and the…
This guide is available as a Word document or PDF. Natural Versus Synthesized Voice Instructors have the option of lecturing with the human voice or a computer-generated voice. In a study involving a lecture on lightning formation, students learned better from the recorded human voice than the Microsoft text-to-speech software (Atkinson et al., 2005). This…
This guide is available as a Word document or PDF. Incorporating drawing as a learning activity to accompany textual information can be helpful for meeting learning outcomes compared to no drawing (Leutner & Schmeck, 2021). According to the drawing principle, the exercise of drawing allows students to engage in generative processing (Leutner & Schmeck, 2021)…
This guide is available as a Word document or PDF. According to the mapping principle, people learn deeply when they translate complex word-based information into a combined word- and visuospatial format (Adesope et al., 2021; Fiorella & Mayer, 2021). The collaborative mapping principle goes further to suggest that concept mapping can be a collaborative activity…