Book review
E-learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning
Wiley 2003
Authors: Ruth Colvin Clark, Richard E. Mayer
Review by Dr Matthew Fox, Epic Group plc
What does it take to make a successful e-learning
programme? How should you evaluate the e-learning you have
commissioned when it is delivered? How can you be confident
that good learning, and therefore performance improvement,
will be the result? These are key questions for e-learning
practitioners, which have been addressed with some success
in Clark and Mayer's new book on e-learning design.
What marks this work out from others on the
subject is that the authors have backed up their assertions
with empirical evidence from research projects. For example;
they illustrate a point about leaving out extraneous or distracting
graphics in media with an experiment conducted by Harp and
Mayer (1997) in which students were given a text to read on
lightning strikes. Students who read the passage accompanied
by elaborate colour photos with additional captions - as opposed
to the text with simple graphics - showed 73% less retention
of knowledge and 52% fewer solutions on a transfer test. This
sort of illustration with practical examples is welcome (even
if the examples used do tend to favour the US industry rather
heavily!).
The book is strong in this area of exploring
how media can be used effectively. The best use of learning
tasks (practice, application of knowledge) are also evaluated
and explained with, again, plenty of evidence from learning
research. The backbone of the book is provided by seven design
principles; multimedia, contiguity, modality, redundancy,
coherence, personalisation, and practice opportunities. Clear
explanations are given about the risks of ignoring these principles
- with support from worked examples and case study challenges.
However, while developers and buyers of e-learning
alike will welcome the copious empirical evidence supplied
by this work, they will find little that is new in the practices
and techniques it covers. Issues of cognitive overload, memory
processing, retention and transfer have been well enough documented
elsewhere. And the book has, to my mind, one fairly glaring
ommission.
Clark and Mayer provide no explanation or evidence
for the structuring of learning events in effective sequences
based on the psychological models they describe.
This is an important issue, and one that gets
no discussion at all here. Learning is not just about the
effective use of media and learning tasks. It is also about
building learning through effective sequencing. This is a
significant gap in a book which I would other wise commend
wholeheartedly for its clarity of message and a compelling
body of supporting evidence.
Carping aside, there is much to applaud in this
volume. Many aspects of e-learning design have been inherited
from the CBT world and classroom training design, and it is
only relatively recently that a language and science of design
for e-learning have begun to emerge. Clark and Mayer are to
be commended for having undertaken a systematic review of
findings from many areas of learning design and assembled
them to make a practical and highly readable guide.
The result is a good practical reference that opens
up the core issues of good design for maximising learning, which
I would recommend to anyone getting to grips with the fundamentals
of designing for e-learning.
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