Has PowerPoint Made Us Worse Instructional Designers?
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Richard Mayer is one of the most influential educational psychologists of the past half-century. His research on multimedia learning, instructional design, and cognitive processes has shaped how educators and designers think about effective teaching. Best known for his principles of multimedia instruction, Mayer’s work explores how students learn from words and pictures, how technology can enhance or hinder learning, and what cognitive science tells us about education in the digital age.
Richard joins Thomas to discuss what makes a well-designed PowerPoint, why transfer is so elusive in education, how to balance cognitive load in instructional design, whether AI-generated feedback can be effective, what virtual reality gets wrong about learning, how prior knowledge impacts multimedia instruction, why game-based learning often misses the mark, whether younger generations are better at processing digital media, how to separate education fads from real breakthroughs, what he’s learned from decades of collaboration, and what he’s working on next.
Recorded: 15 January 2025
00:00 Introductions
Thompson: Today, I have the pleasure of chatting with Richard E. Mayer, a professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara. Richard is one of the best people to talk to if you're at all interested—as I assume those of you who listen to this are—in applying the science of learning to education. He has published numerous foundational texts for those interested in the intersection of cognition, instruction, and technology—specifically in the areas of multimedia learning, computer-supported learning, learning in games, learning and VR environments, and instructional videos, but perhaps he's most widely known to the teacher for a set of principles of multimedia instruction which bear his name.
The 2017 edition of the Handbook of Research on Learning and Instruction, which he co-edited with Patricia Alexander, has come to structure much of the foundations of how I think about learning and instruction.
His output is absolutely staggering. According to Google Scholar, he's been cited a total of 239,639 times as their metrics have it. And this pace still seems to continue with a forthcoming third edition of Multimedia Learning, persistent research outputs, and terrific work being done at the Mayer Lab. I could go on, but suffice it to say, this is a conversation I'm truly delighted to have. Richard, welcome.
Mayer: Thank you, Thomas. I really appreciate the invitation
01:44 On Educational Psychologists & Transfer
Thompson: So, general question about educational psychologists. Do you all make better teachers than professors who don't daily think about how learning works?
Mayer: [Laughs] Oh no. It really puts a lot of pressure on you when you supposedly know about how learning works and how instruction works, and you kind of see your own slides and look at your, maybe, videos of your class—it's a very humbling experience. [Laughs] Yeah, that's something; sometimes, my students point out also.
Thompson: Would you say, maybe, you're more efficient learners? I mean, you put out a book in 2019 called How to Be a Successful Student, 20 Study Habits for the Science of Learning. Do you transfer those lessons learned to your own habits of study and how you approach learning new things?
Mayer: I think some of them, yes, I do try. Some of them work for me. I think different strategies probably work for different people. But yeah, I do try to use some of those strategies myself. And I do try to use some of my principles when I'm teaching. So, hopefully—hopefully—it has some positive effect.
Thompson: If the concept of transfer is something long thought about in educational psychology, should it be alarming if we can't well transfer what we know about teaching and learning to effective instruction?
Mayer: Yeah. That was really a good juxtaposition. Yes, we believe in transfer. I mean, that's the goal of just about every educational institution. You want to learn in a way so you can use what you've learned in new situations. You're also asking about transfer of a kind of research to the real world. That's another kind of transfer that is really interesting.
I've spent most of my career working on trying to do rigorous scientific research, usually in a lab setting, occasionally in a classroom, and come up with all these supposed principles, but if they don't really work in real classrooms with real students, you know, they're not really all that useful. So I think that is a really good point to make. We need to see how these principles work in context.
We have some classroom studies that are encouraging that show if you alter, you know, classroom lessons based on some of the principles we have that does improve learning outcomes. That makes me feel a little better, but we certainly need a lot more research and understanding of how to translate these principles to K-12 education, college teaching, and also professional development for adult learning.
04:51 On Classroom Studies
Thompson: Is it just hard to do good controlled research in the classroom? Are there too many confounds? There's a lot of different students approaching the classroom, teacher effects, different things like this. Is that part of the issue why we see less research where you're doing the studies in the classroom?
Mayer: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. It's harder to have experimental control in a classroom. So there's kind of a trade-off there. But there are ways to maintain it. When we've done classroom studies, we usually have observers with checklists to gauge whether there is good fidelity. In other words, is the instructor really following the instructional methods that we want them to follow? So, there are ways to verify that there's good experimental control.
There are also logistical issues with just getting access to classrooms. A lot of K-12 institutions are so, you know, they're so focused on making sure their students do well on the standardized tests that they don't want to spend any time doing anything that's not directed towards that. Sometimes, it's hard to actually get into real classrooms.
Thompson: Could a part of that be in attempting to try to measure, say, for the fidelity of applying a single principle or single method or technique, if you will, that you're kind of removing the teacher from that latticework of different methods and techniques they might employ in the course of teaching. Is it less about the fidelity of a single method and more about how that method works into that broader framework that the teacher's operating in? What's your take on this?
Mayer: That's a really good point. Yeah, I think that's part of the issue also. The instructional methods or techniques that we think are helpful have to fit into the teacher's style and how the teacher wants to run things.
So, the whole issue of taking these principles and studying them in context is something that's important to do and that our lab has not done very much. Sometimes, when we do classroom studies, we run the classroom. Then, OK, we know things are going the way we want them to. It's rare to try and have the teacher actually do it.
07:01 On the What Works Clearinghouse
Thompson: Is something like the What Works Clearinghouse an effective tool for, say, providing teachers with a range of learning objects and materials that perhaps adhere to these certain methods or techniques, or rather bring them to bear? So it's kind of plug-and-play as to where it fits in, but we know this piece is at least well-designed.
Mayer: We've had this discussion a lot with my research group and my students. I think the What Works Clearinghouse has a really great role to play. It kind of pinpoints instructional methods that have been shown to be effective. So it's really something to look at, but as you're alluding to, when you try to implement these things in your classroom with your approach to things in context, the situation isn't exactly the same as the research studies that the Clearinghouse is talking about. There's always just some work in figuring out how you actually implement these things in a specific context.
08:23 On Working at UC Santa Barbra
Thompson: To switch gears a little bit, and we'll come back to some of the other details. You got your PhD from the University of Michigan in 1973, and you've worked at UC Santa Barbara since 1975. What's so great about UC Santa Barbara that you've worked there for what will be 50 years? Is it the weather? I mean, it looks very sunny behind you. Is it the culture that you find appealing?
Mayer: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think I have good staying power. Um, you know, yeah, I'm a midwesterner. I grew up in Cincinnati, went to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and then the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. And then, my first job was at Indiana University in Bloomington. So, my life was kind of in the Midwest growing up.
Coming to UCSB, Tom, was an eye-opener. I had never been to California before. Most people who grew up where I did thought California was just a strange place—it's probably going to fall into the ocean from earthquakes. But UCSB has turned out to be a really wonderful research environment. I have a wonderful research lab, I have really great students to work with, and I have research collaborators from all over the world who want to come—I'm thinking they want to come to work with me, but maybe they want to come for the weather. I don't know. But it's a wonderful environment, and it's a place where I can do the research that I want to do, and I have all the resources I need to do it.
09:46 On the Last 50 Years of Developments in Educational Psychology
Thompson: How has the nature of that changed over the last 50 years? Is the type of research people are doing now much different than it was in 1975? Is there less theory-building? Are we more quantitative? I guess, what are the major differences? Maybe institutional differences as well.
Mayer: Yeah, things have changed. They've stayed the same in a lot of ways, too. I'd have to say, mean, it's been interesting to be at the University of California, Santa Barbara, because I didn't realize it when I came—it was a pretty new university. Really, it has a long history going back to the early 1900s, but as a major, as an R1 research institution, it really only started in about 1959. That's when it moved to its current campus and had all these great academic buildings. So it's been interesting to watch a really excellent research university develop.
We've developed in terms of just having more research labs, more research funding, and a lot more research activity. The number of students hasn't really gone up that much because there are certain constraints on the housing situation. The research power of the university is just really growing, especially in the STEM areas and particularly more applied STEM areas like engineering. In my particular department, when I came, I was in the Department of Psychology. Now, I'm in a department—we changed our name to the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. So, this kind of reflects a shift in my field towards brain science and looking at what brain imaging techniques can do to help us understand how the human mind works. Just in terms of quantity, the campus has grown in terms of research capacity. But in terms of just the mission, I don't think it's changed at all.
Thompson: I don't want to read too much into the renaming of the department, but a cognitive question, I suppose. Where does learning come from in multimedia instruction, then? Like, what's the cognitive model of learning with words and pictures? My sensory organs—my eyes, my ears—they pick up on the words and pictures in a multimedia presentation. What happens next from there?
11:52 On The Cognitive Processes at Play in Multimedia Learning
Mayer: Yeah, well, that's kind of been my research. I was a grad student who wanted to kind of understand what meaningful learning is because this is a concept that's been around in psychology and education since really the beginning of both of those fields in the 1800s. How does learning work? What is meaningful learning? What does it mean to learn for transfer? That's kind of the question I've been trying to figure out. What I've been trying to do is look at different instructional techniques that could help you learn for transfer. I don't know if I'm answering your question. Can you...
Thompson: The sensory input coming through my eyes and ears. How do I select for the messages I'm going to move into my short-term memory, and how do I relate these to, say, prior knowledge or something like this? Like what's the sequence of how these messages are processed, or does it depend on the channel and what kind of message you're sending and how you're sending them, whether you're saying it, reading it, viewing it on a TV screen?
Mayer: That's kind of the heart of what we've been trying to do. Figure out what are the cognitive processes involved in meaningful learning. So, as you're alluding to, the three processes that I've been focusing on and that are consistent with theories of meaningful learning that have developed over a long period of time are you have to pay attention to the relevant material. Information comes in through our eyes and ears and other senses, too, but I'm just focusing on eyes and ears right now. That information disappears within a fraction of a second, so it fades away. We have to pay attention to some of that incoming information.
Our cognitive architecture is such that we don't have the capacity to pay attention to everything. So we have to be very selective. That first process I call selecting, and that's really the first step in learning—learning how to pay attention to what's important in terms of what's coming in. So teachers can present a lot of information. You have a slide that has all kinds of information on it, but people can't really process more than a few of those pieces of information at any one time. So that's the first step. Then, once we do that—
Thompson: Is that a skill, or is that fixed? Is that trainable? Can I pick up on a longer sequence of digits arbitrarily or something like this?
Mayer: Yes. You can train to do a better job, let's say, on a digit sequence, and there are some really interesting studies in the history of psychology where people have trained for hundreds of hours, and they can increase their digit span so that they can remember 50 digits. But that's very specialized. You're not really increasing your memory. You're learning all kinds of really creative techniques or how to do that particular task. So yeah, I think our limited attention is fixed to the extent that we can't, when we're looking at something, can't really—we're not tape recorders, and we're not cameras. We're not taking a picture that lasts. It just lasts for a fraction of a second, and we have to pick out stuff from it that we want to process more deeply.
Then, in our working memory, we have a little more capacity. Things fade away within, well, early research would say, 18 seconds or so if we don't actively think about them. So we have to be actively putting things together in working memory. I call that organizing where we're trying to build coherent representations of the words that are coming in and the images that are coming in. So as people are listening to this, they're trying to put the words together to make some sense out of it. We don't have a lot of graphics, so I guess I don't have to worry about that part. And then the next step is to activate your relevant prior knowledge and connect it up with the incoming information. I call that integrating. So, we need to connect the visual and verbal representations that we're building with each other and with relevant prior knowledge from long-term memory. So these three processes of selecting, organizing, and integrating, think are, that's kind of the heart of meaningful learning. When we say active learning, I think that's what we really mean. We don't merely mean physical activity. We really mean cognitive activity. And cognitive activity involves, I think, those three processes. So, good instruction should guide those three processes.
17:10 On The Relative Value of Slideshows
Thompson: As you were saying earlier, instruction with words and pictures isn't particularly new. You wrote about one breakthrough in multimedia instruction that occurred in 1658 with an illustrated children's book. In the long arc of multimedia instructional innovations, has PowerPoint, Google Slides, Canva, and the like made us worse designers of multimedia instructional activities, on average, or better?
Mayer: There are people who would say it's made it worse. And there are some very famous papers on that topic. Like any new technology, it has a lot of potential to improve learning, but there are pitfalls with it, also. Some of the pitfalls are, at least let's say with PowerPoint is, you're kind of tempted to just fill the slide with words. Use the templates that PowerPoint has just to have all these bullet points and long sentences and things. That's probably not a good use of PowerPoint, but there are ways to use it where you can integrate graphics and a few words—don't have too many words, and the graphics shouldn't be too complicated. But I do think it opens up a set of possibilities.
So, I think with any medium, what we need to do is study how to maximize learning with that medium. So, PowerPoint, I think, has become the standard for a lot of training and educational presentations. That's why a lot of our research is just focused at that level on how do you put together a PowerPoint presentation that is effective.
18:55 On How to Put Together an Effective PowerPoint Presentation
Thompson: How do you put together a PowerPoint presentation that's effective? Thank you. That's a great question.
Mayer: So, I mean, most of our principles that we've developed could apply to that situation. There are some techniques that are aimed at what I would call reducing extraneous processing. So, that's cognitive processing that does not support the instructional objective. So, it's usually caused by poor instructional design. Having too much stuff on the screen—that's poor instructional design. So, one way to reduce extraneous processing is to reduce the amount of extraneous material that you're presenting—don't present images and words that aren't really directed towards the instructional objective. I call that the coherence principle—keep it simple.
Another principle what would be a good example is spatial contiguity. If we have printed words and graphics, usually, people have a caption at the bottom or a legend at the bottom. That's really going to create extraneous processing because you read some of the captions, then you look up, and your eyes try to fixate on where they should be. So, your fixations bounce around until they find the right part of the graphic. Then you've got to go back down and read some more so your eyes bounce around until they find the text again. You're spending a lot of time scanning back and forth, wasting your visual fixations. It would be better to take those words and put them next to the part of the graphic they're talking about so that you don't have all those wasted fixations. So, I call that spatial contiguity. Just doing something as simple as that greatly improves people's learning from a PowerPoint presentation.
21:12 On Coherence, Signaling, and Extraneous Processing
Thompson: What do you think are some misunderstood elements or underrated elements in your principles as they relate to this level of designing PowerPoints? Perhaps teachers do a pretty good job of spatial contiguity, and they're placing the text where it belongs relative to the image. Or they were to cut back on the extraneous processing, and there's coherence to the slides, and everything relates to one another. What are the things maybe they're not doing—the practical things they could correct rather quickly that you feel often get overlooked?
Mayer: I think those two actually are often violated. When I look at textbooks, for example, they must always have captions under the figure. The text is not in the figure; it's underneath because those are the standards that the designers of the books are told to use, and that's the way publishers tell you to do it. In terms of cognitive processing, that makes it a lot harder. And the same thing for coherence. Most textbooks have a lot of extraneous, irrelevant information, both graphics and words.
Another kind of similar thing is what I would call signaling, which is just highlighting the important information. Maybe having an outline, having headings that are key to that outline, that's kind of verbal signaling, and then you can have visual signaling in terms of just highlighting the parts of the graphic to look at while you're talking about it. So, if you have a PowerPoint presentation, you want the parts of the graphic to be highlighted as you're talking about them so that people know where to look. Those are things that seem simple, but I think those very simple principles are often violated.
I think to me surprising principles have to do with how you manage essential processing, which is processing just to get the information into your working memory. Sometimes, even if you can deal with all those kinds of principles, you might have a lesson that's just really complicated for a learner, and it will overload their working memory. So. one way of dealing with content that's overloading is to break it into parts and just present it part by part and build up. I call that the segmenting principle. So, in that way, you're not just presenting everything at once in a way that just overwhelms the information processing system. That's a pretty straightforward, easy thing to do, but it's, think, rarely done.
Then, we have principles that are aimed at getting people to make sense of the material. I call that fostering generative processing. How do you get people to actually want to understand it? One very simple technique that we found is what we call the personalization principle, which is to state the words in a conversational style rather than a formal style. This includes using first and second person like I, you, and we, instead of just always using third person. That greatly improves learning, which, at first, seemed odd to me, but it's a pretty consistent finding. It helps build a social connection between the learner and the teacher, even when you're having a synchronous situation. Other techniques that are similar to that are things like having a positive, appealing voice rather than a machine voice, which we have in some lessons, or just a kind of bored-sounding voice. Voice carries a lot of social information, and it conveys to learners whether you care about them or not. At least, that's the way learners interpret it. The same goes for gestures; having happy facial expressions—that has an effect on learning.
25:16 On Prior Knowledge and Pre-Training
Thompson: So you have, let's say, those bundle effects on one hand, and you have student prior knowledge on the other, which tends to weigh out more heavily and ultimately affect learning gains. Is it a very well-structured multimedia presentation, or is it the student having the requisite procedural, declarative, conceptual knowledge related to the lesson at hand?
Mayer: Well, we know that prior knowledge has a huge role to play in instruction, learning, and instruction.
Thompson: Pre-training is a principle...
Mayer: Pre-training is one of the principles. So, you know, having prior knowledge is really helpful, but most of my principles probably work better for novices. `We have to look at what I call the boundary conditions for these principles, like when do they apply and for whom do they apply. They usually apply best for people who are beginners. If you're more experienced, you can overcome poor instructional design. But if you're a beginner, it's much harder to overcome this poor instruction. instructional design is one way to help people learn. Another way is, like you're saying, to build better learning strategies in learners. So, I think it's possible to teach students to be more effective learners. There are strategies for learning where you just kind of try to explain the material to yourself that doesn't make sense, or you try to summarize it to yourself, or you make a drawing of the material, or explain it to somebody else. These are all techniques that would help you. There are all kinds of note-taking techniques and summarizing techniques that help you process the information more deeply. So, one way to go about this is to try to make the presentation better designed. Another way is to try to help students become better learners by equipping them with learning strategies.
27:04 On Memes and Younger Generation's Decoding Skills
Thompson: Thinking that this applies more to novice learners, and there's a kind of sliding scale, so to speak, as you become more expert in the field, you need fewer and fewer scaffolds. Do you see any data out there to suggest that subsequent generations may be better processors of multimedia messages? I think of this about how they say like decode a meme versus how you or I might, you know, just a single line of text with a single ubiquitous image, but they know the vibe and understand what that means in that specific context, which is pretty interesting. What's your take on this?
Mayer: That's a really interesting question that I get a lot of. We know that the brain does not evolve a lot over one generation, so I don't think there are any structural changes going on. I think there's a misconception that being exposed to lots of different things at the same time improves your ability to multitask. We are just not designed to multitask. Humans really don't multitask. What we're doing when we have lots of different things going on at the same time is just shifting back and forth between them in an efficient way. So, people who are good at quote multitasking are really just good at task switching, which is a learnable skill. And so if you have a lot of experience with that, it might help you.
28:22 On Task Switching
Thompson: And that incurs a cognitive cost, though, right? Task switching from one thing to the next.
Mayer: It does. And I think for most academic learning, we really don't want a lot of task-switching. We want you focused on the lesson and on the content of the lesson. So being able to control your attention, you know, comes under the heading of executive function, and I think it is an essential part of learning. Nobody teaches you how to do this, but it's something you know, skilled, successful learners know how to do this. They know how to control their attention.
29:10 On Studying or Working with Music
Thompson: Now, if I were to go into YouTube, I would pull up hundreds of thousands of videos that would also be four-hour mixes for study or things like this, and people have their headphones on. They're listening to music. They're looking at a text. They're taking notes and making flashcards. I don't know what it is, but is this incurring an additional cost when I'm also playing the music in the background, or is it kind of like how Brian Eno described ambient music, which is that it's ignorable but interesting enough if you do pay attention, like is there a balance? Because they'll say, you know, binaural beats for focus. And I'm like, is this? There's nothing to this. How are you telling me that this beat is going to assist my focusing on this topic? I don't see it. I'm curious what your take on this would be.
Mayer: I mean, you have to, we have to start with kind of what we know from cognitive science. We know that there are two different channels for processing information, a verbal and visual channel. That's pretty wired in. We know that there is limited capacity in our information processing system so that we only can focus on maybe three or four things at a time. So if we have things going on in the background and we have limited cognitive capacity, to the extent that that capacity is focusing on that background stuff, there's not capacity to focus on the core content of what you're trying to learn. to the extent that the music is distracting for you, That's going to hurt learning.
Thompson: I'm asking because I'm ultimately guilty of this. I'll put music on basically all the time when I'm working. There's always something playing. I found that I cannot listen to music that has lyrics, a singer, or vocals whatsoever or else I'm totally thrown off. If you're singing while I'm working, it doesn't work. Also, I could hardly describe it as music anymore. I'll listen to a mix of a song that is a stretched version, which is an hour long, and it just sounds like one synth cord running in the background for an hour. There are no changes. It's not distracting. Every once in a while, an ad pops up, and that throws me off completely. But in general, it's like unobtrusive. At this point, am I even doing anything? Am I narrowing the realm of things that I'm thinking about and distracted by? I'm not sure.
Mayer: Yeah, that seems to be like the least distracting, and it could have the effect of just helping you continue with what you're doing, especially if it's like some kind of low-level task, then having that in the background can be helpful. But if it's a really deep intellectual task that you're engaged in, maybe trying to understand a really complicated text, it's probably not the greatest. Some people argue that it causes you to focus more on the material because you're blocking out. You have to focus on blocking out that other stuff. So, I think that's a researchable question. But I think, based on research, you would say it would be better to study in a quiet place where you're not going to be distracted.
32:15 On Critical Thinking, Mastery, and Transfer
Thompson: I'm going to jump out of multimedia instruction for a minute, and we'll talk about a few other things. So, I'm going to throw a few definitions at you, and you tell me where you disagree with what I'm saying. Suppose I define critical thinking as the application of prior knowledge to novel situations effectively, which I think I lifted from Daniel Willingham, and I define transfer as the application of prior knowledge to novel situations effectively. Am I really just using two different terms to describe the same thing? Isn't this also how we define mastery? What's the difference between transfer and what people say when they say critical thinking? Is there much of a difference or are we getting at the same thing here?
Mayer: That's a good question. These are both two good things that we want to happen in learners. Transfer has a long history in psychology and education and a pretty clear definition. kind of what you said, it's kind of the effect of prior learning on new learning. So the idea is if you have positive transfer, it means what you've already learned is helping you either learn this new thing or perform this new task, or adapt to this new situation. So having had that experience, previous experience is helping you adapt or learn. That is usually what we mean by transfer, which is generally recognized as the goal of education in general. Critical thinking, in my mind, means I have a slightly narrower conception of critical thinking as the ability to evaluate, you know, different alternatives based on criteria to figure out, you know, which one fits the criteria. So I just may have a more narrow definition in my mind of critical thinking. Because my idea is that what you're doing with critical thinking is looking at a product, looking at something that's there, and determining whether it meets certain criteria or not. don't know if that makes sense to you.
Thompson: For the task itself, you have procedural knowledge of how to do that task effectively, which I would argue is the application of that prior knowledge to that specific task, kind of giving way to a larger conception. Perhaps I'm defining it too broadly.
Mayer: That's quite possible. I mean, I think it's a kind of transfer, sure. and it's certainly one of the goals of education that, you know, most employers would say they want. They want people who can engage in critical thinking. And they also want people who can be innovative. So, we'll call that creative thinking. So I think those two together kind of complement each other. Creative thinking is kind of generating new ideas. Critical thinking is evaluating those ideas. So, one goal. most people have as an exacting definition as you, is it more of an amorphous concept to most folks out there when they say critical thinking, they're not, they have a, you know, a notion of what that means, but perhaps not. Maybe. Yeah. Mine is more kind of classical, a classical definition. And I like it because it's, it's, it's clearer to me. What is it, if we're trying to teach people to engage in critical thinking? We need to give them practice in comparing some kind of product to criteria to see if it meets those criteria. So, I want to see what's the best method for solving a problem. What's our criteria for judging that? And then we can tell which is better.
35:50 On Translating Research to Practice
Thompson: To expand on that question, what do you see as the core barriers preventing research insights from trickling into daily teaching practice?
Mayer: Yeah, that's a really interesting question too. I think there's always a lag between the state of research in a field and the actual practice. Honestly, that's just based on the wisdom of practitioners because sometimes the newest, coolest thing doesn't really pan out in the long run. There are lots of fads we have, and I guess it's not a fad in research, but there are lots of startling findings that seem really eye-popping when they come out, and then when we find out as we do more research, it's a little more nuanced. So I think sometimes it is good to kind of just be careful what you do. And also just to be modest, Our field of ed-psych, it hasn't had the resources that the physical sciences have had. So the development of what we know hasn't been quite as fast. We know a lot about, I think, how learning works and how instruction works, especially in the last 20 or 30 years. There's been an explosion of good information. But yeah, it probably just takes some time for it to filter into actual practice. I mean, that obviously is one of the main goals of why we want to do research. We want to understand how learning works, but we also have a practical goal of wanting to improve education.
Thompson: So how would you, or rather, how does that force you to approach educators or administrators who kind of get swept up in the latest fads thinking that X technology is going to revolutionize learning or something like this? What's the best counsel you would offer on separating the hype of the fads from the substance?
Mayer: Yeah. Well, think there are a lot of, I think that has to do with kind of the education of the educational administrators and teachers. So I do think when we look at the training that they're given, it's changing. I think things have become a lot more evidence-based. People talk about evidence-based practice. In education, we're all committed to evidence-based practice. It's just a matter of how we really implement that. So I think that's been a good shift to at least recognize that's what we should be trying to do. And I do think there are a lot of school administrators and teachers who you know, recognize the things that we're talking about. So hopefully they'll be the leaders who will guide us.
39:04 On Emerging Technologies
Thompson: So that said, knowing that there's this kind of lag between maybe what we know in studies versus what we apply in practice and that perhaps there's some overhyped educational technologies, which emerging technologies are you most bullish on for education and where do you see the greatest risks?
Mayer: Yeah, you know, I've done a lot of research with educational technologies. I don't know, partly because they're just fun. They're interesting. And that's what funding agencies fund sometimes. But I honestly don't think technology causes learning. I mean, it's the instructional methods that cause learning. So I am really more interested in what are effective instructional methods. If you're using this medium, like if you're using virtual reality, what's the best instructional method? If you're using a game-based approach, how should you design educational games? If you're doing a PowerPoint presentation, what are some principles there? Because I think it's the instructional method that causes people to learn. It's not the medium. Because it's like asking, do people learn better from books or computers? That's kind of a silly question really. So we really want to know if you're learning from a book, how should we design the book? If you're learning from a computer, how should we design the lessons on a computer?
Thompson: Not a fan of Marshall McLuhan, I take it.
Mayer: Well, to a certain extent, I think the medium is the message because it is conveying a certain worldview.
Thompson: So, there's certain affordances and boundaries to a medium that would make that medium more or less conducive of conveying a certain instructional method.
Mayer: Exactly. Exactly. So I think each one could have its own niche. And we've been trying to explore immersive virtual reality as an instructional tool. mean, it's generally used for entertainment and same for games. Games are generally used for entertainment, but is there a is there a place for them in more conventional instruction? How should we use them? What's the best way to design experiences with them? I think those are good research questions. we've been trying to figure out, most recently, how to design experiences in immersive virtual reality. The problem with virtual reality is it's very distracting. It's just so perceptually rich and exciting. You're kind of overwhelmed by the whole experience and you might not really be focusing in on the educational message.
41:51 On Game-Based and Gamified Learning
Thompson: what if you say are in an immersive virtual reality environment in some sort of game based setting, right? A simulation perhaps, right? Where the. win state of the game maps on to success of a particular learning objective. Is that something that we see or is it more that there's a game and the learning objectives are kind of put on top? Like you answer so many questions and then you get to play the game for 30 seconds rather than winning the game relates to you meaningfully meeting the objective at hand or whatever it is.
Mayer: Right. That's kind of the difference between what I would call game based learning and Gamified learning. So you can take a task and gamify it like you're saying. It's probably is not going to be as effective as actually building the instructional objective into the game or even making a simulation. Having it be a simulation game where it's simulating what the kind of performance we want people to be able to do. So I always think it's much better to have the game be about what it is we want people to be able to do.
Thompson: Because people learn game mechanics. mean, it's quite interesting how quickly people pick them up as well. You play through a tutorial stage in a video game, and before long, you've mastered that, and you're adding new moves on top of it. And games can get rather complex these days. But I don't see the breakthrough where you're able to neatly map the learning of the game mechanics to the also learning of an objective. It seems like a real struggle to get that.
Mayer: It is. And I think most of the research on, let's say, just playing off the shelf games is that they don't, they don't really have great educational benefit. The only one, which some people are a little bumped about is playing action video games, know, first person shooter games. I think it's been shown to improve cognitive skills, like perceptual attention, being able to. be more aware of what's going on in your visual periphery. So being able to control your perceptual attention, because that's what you're doing in those games, and you're practicing that constantly. And it does improve that skill on more traditional measures of perceptual attention. So that's the only game that I've been able to find that actually has some kind of an educational benefit that I'm not sure I want to recommend everybody go out there and Shoot.
Thompson: Yeah. I've seen what was the game? I it was called Portal, where they developed an education facing version of it to demonstrate, you know, physics principles. But that's more or less demonstrating something inside of a game based environment as opposed to actually meaningfully engaging the students such that the win state in the game equates the meaning of a learning objective. It's kind of right. Just that interactive representation of the principle that you're talking about.
Mayer: Yeah, Portal, I think, was a good try. I mean, I think it was very well-intentioned and very clever. Not sure there's a whole lot of evidence that it actually does succeed in doing what they wanted it to do, but it's fun anyway.
45:30 On Collaboration
Thompson: Yeah, I mean, it's a fun game, definitely. All right, a few more questions. So you mean you've co-edited o-edited numerous volumes. mean, you have collaborations such as the Handbook of Research on Learning and Instruction. I mean, this suggests a strong kind of networked approach to scholarship. How have collaborations shaped your work's trajectory? And is there a particular partnership or co-edited project that's kind of really changed your perspective the most?
Mayer: Yeah, I think one thing they don't teach you in graduate school is just how important it is to work as a team because My conception as a grad student was, I'll have these ideas, I'll think of experiments, I'll run the experiments, won't that be great? But that's really not how it works. There are just a group of us around the world, not that many really, working on these questions. We need to talk to each other, we need to collaborate with each other. Almost every project I ever work on has a multidisciplinary team. People who know about cognitive science, people who know about education, people who know about the technology side of things. And people have different perspectives. So that's been one eye-opening part of my career is just how team-based research is. So that's really been essential to, I think, the work of my lab. I'm always working well obviously with my students and with collaborators from around the world. We wouldn't have these principles if it wasn't for all of them. So I think that's essential and working in a really creative, it's a really creative task to even to figure out what to study and then how to study it. So that's hard to do as an individual. You really need peers to to bounce ideas off of.
47:20 On Feedback
Thompson: Two questions about feedback, and then we'll wrap this thing up. Which aspects of feedback, timeliness, specificity, and relation to student prior knowledge do you think carry the most weight for actual learning gains? Like, what's the most important part of feedback for a student?
Mayer: Yeah. You're really asking really fundamental questions. And feedback is essential for learning. If you just practice without feedback, you're not going to learn. We've done that for more than 100 years. So the question is, what is effective feedback? How do you design effective feedback? Timeliness? That's been an interesting research question. The answer is, like a lot of questions in psychology, it depends. So maybe immediate feedback is good in initial stages of learning when it's a certain kind of task. But, you know, more delayed feedback is probably better when you're more expert or when you're trying to perform something; you don't want to interrupt people in the middle of their performance. That's not, that is not a good way to provide feedback. So that question is kind of an it depends question. Specificity? Yeah. Just general feedback like good job or Whatever; that's not effective. I think the more, well, it's a little effective. The specific feedback about where you are and where you need to be is what's needed. We don't need feedback about, you're in the 50th percentile now. We need feedback about, well, you've got it like 50 % done, and here's the rest of the part that you need to get. So I think specific feedback about what you're doing well and what you need to do next. The more specific the feedback is, the better, but it has to be pretty short because if it's too long, that's also going to be problematic. One interesting thing, one of my students is working on for a dissertation is looking at the emotional tone of the feedback, which is a less studied issue. But we have a little videos. of instructor providing the feedback. if she has kind of a positive tone, positive facial expression, positive voice, while she's kind of explaining what the right answer is, that's more effective than if she just has a neutral kind of just these are the facts kind of approach. So even just the emotional tone, because people can take feedback as constructive or as a critique of them as a person. You want them to take it as, this is feedback about the task. It's not about you. It's about the task that you're working on and how you're going to get better on that task.
Thompson: To that point, I mean, I've seen some recent studies that suggest perhaps it matters less where the feedback comes from and more about the judgment the student makes about how much that feedback actually relates to the project that they're working on. The conclusion, I suppose, is that you could do AI-generated feedback. so long as the student rates this as a thing that relates to the task at hand, that they'll take it and still use it and not think about this in a way such that they would say someone that's giving kind of more nonchalant or less positive feedback in tone.
Mayer: I think that that really makes sense. And the whole issue of AI-based feedback, think, is really going to be an interesting issue. I everyone in our field is trying to figure out how is AI going to fit in? I mean, that's what we're all thinking about. yeah, AI-based feedback is a really interesting idea. mean, what our research would say is that it would be good if it's kind of friendly and not just just the plain facts, but presents that in a more conversational friendly way. I think people will accept technology as a social partner if it acts that way. I think people are very good at interacting with a computer as if it's another person. It doesn't take much for us to be able to do that. We just don't want to break that illusion by being too mechanical.
Thompson: As you alluded to earlier, is, you know, for a long time, we've tried to do learning without feedback and, you know, treated feedback is almost kind of this scarce resource, you know, teachers only have so many, you know, so much time to offer personalized feedback to the students work. Can you give too much feedback? I can see a situation as a pitfall where an AI is able to say, pop in at any moment throughout a given task and perhaps too many moments throughout a given task and giving you very minute feedback details on every aspect of it such that you never really finished the task. You're always just kind of tightening things up along the way. Can you give too much feedback?
Mayer: Definitely. I think that's it. That's really an important empirical question and probably depends on each kind of task and the learner. But definitely. You definitely don't want to be disruptive, especially if you're learning some performance and don't want to interrupt people in the middle of their performance. You just have to tell them afterward, yeah, you should have, you know, then it bent this way instead of that way. Also, I think the amount of feedback in a message is important. It needs to be focused, and just We know people can't pay attention to too much information. So, we just want to focus on the the key elements we want people to change.
53:17 On The Impact of His Work
Thompson: Last three questions and they're about you. You've had the opportunity to see one, the kind of enduring impact of a lot of your work. Do you see any misconceptions about your work that you'd like to clear up, or how do you feel about the directions that other people take things that you maybe laid the foundations for? How does that feel seeing the latent impact of your work through time?
Mayer: I try not to worry too much about that part of it. I try to just follow my curiosity and look at questions that seem interesting to me and just try to pursue them. I'm not that worried about criticism. mean, criticisms can be good because they help you get on the right path. positive feedback from the field is nice, too, and I appreciate it. But I think I just try to keep my focus on what are the research questions I'm working on and how we can address those questions. It's fun. It's a field that's fun to be in. It's fun to go to work every day and think of some question you want to try to answer and figure out how to answer it. What could be more fun than that?
54:30 The Richard Mayer Production Function
Thompson: I think that leads into the next question. What is the Richard Mayer production function? How do you keep up the output that you do given the time and constraints that you have?
Mayer: I have lots of smart people I work with. I think that's probably the main secret. mean, I think almost all of the discoveries we've come up with, you know, I've been working with other people with brilliant ideas, especially my students. Time is a really precious resource. So, I try to view it as an economic resource.
I try to segregate the day into parts. In the mornings, I try to devote time to writing, kind of whatever deep thoughts I can have, and getting it on paper. In the afternoon, I would spend more time doing podcasts, talking to people, having meetings with my students, teaching, or doing administrative things. So, at least half the day I can devote to trying to put out a page or two of writing. If I can put out a page or two a day, I'm happy. And then I also just try to segregate the week in certain ways because you can't work all the time. I try to reserve the weekend for family time, and certainly evenings for family time, and maybe reviewing journal articles, writing letters of recommendation, kind of service, things like that. So, I try to have certain parts of the day and certain parts of the week that I do certain things. And I try to have a list of what I want to accomplish each day. And then I also have a list of things, you my to do list like we all have, usually on a yellow pad of all the things I want to accomplish, just, you know, probably for the next few weeks. And then I also have probably the last person in the world, it still has like this kind of paper calendar, right? I have everything on there that I need for the month. So I kind of have a daily to-do list, a kind of weekly month, weekly or list of things to accomplish and then my great calendar. So that keeps me on track. Because I feel if I've written down, I don't have to keep thinking about it. These are the things I have to do.
57:07 Conclusion
Thompson: Last question: what are you working on next?
Mayer: I'm trained as a cognitive psychologist, so a lot of our theoretical ideas are like cognitive processes; what are the cognitive processes in learning? But I've gotten a lot more interested in the kind of the social and affective aspects of learning. We're trying to expand our little model of multimedia learning to include affective and social processes as well as these cognitive processes. At the theoretical level, we're trying to figure out things like that. For example, if you have a more positive instructor, how does that affect your processing? And just in terms of media, we're starting to focus more deeply on learning an immersive virtual reality because I think that is a really under-explored, overhyped area. So we need to understand what benefits it could have. And I've also gotten a little more involved with what's called animated pedagogical agents. So these are, like, little characters on the screen who interact with you. They could be AI-based at some point, but they help you learn. What's the best way to design them? We're looking at what features should they be like you as the learner, same gender and race, age and body type, or does that even matter? Can you have a social relationship with a cartoon character on the screen?
Thompson: A Paperclip as Microsoft would have had it.
Mayer: Clippy really ruined things for him. Everybody hated Clippy, but I think there is a way to design pedagogical agents that you like.
Thompson: Well, Richard, thank you so much for your time today.
Mayer: Thank you, Thomas. I've really enjoyed it.