Mayer’s 12 Principles of Multimedia Learning

Principle Overview

1. Coherence Principle – People learn better when extraneous words, pictures and sounds are excluded rather than included. 

2. Signaling Principle – People learn better when cues that highlight the organization of the essential material are added. 

3. Redundancy Principle – People learn better from graphics and narration than from graphics, narration and on-screen text. 

4. Spatial Contiguity Principle – People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the page or screen. 

5. Temporal Contiguity Principle – People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively. 

6. Segmenting Principle – People learn better from a multimedia lesson is presented in user-paced segments rather than as a continuous unit. 

7. Pre-training Principle – People learn better from a multimedia lesson when they know the names and characteristics of the main concepts.  

8. Modality Principle – People learn better from graphics and narrations than from animation and on-screen text. 

9. Multimedia Principle – People learn better from words and pictures than from words alone. 

10. Personalization Principle – People learn better from multimedia lessons when words are in conversational style rather than formal style. 

11. Voice Principle – People learn better when the narration in multimedia lessons is spoken in a friendly human voice rather than a machine voice. 

12. Image Principle – People do not necessarily learn better from a multimedia lesson when the speaker’s image is added to the screen.