Richard Mayer

University of California, Santa Barbara | UCSB · Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

This study investigates the role of embodiment when learning a technical procedure in immersive virtual reality (VR) by introducing a framework based on immersion and interactivity. The goal is to determine how increasing the levels of immersion and interactivity affect learning experiences and outcomes. In a 2 × 2 factorial design, 177 high school...

We introduce an animation system that transforms instructional videos into 3D animations with pedagogical agents, supplemented by animation editing tools to foster expressive, agent-based presentations, thereby enhancing educational benefits. Our system extracts the lecturer’s motion from the imported instructional video. Once the data extraction i...

A long-standing controversy in the learning sciences involves the appropriate balance between more didactic forms of instruction (e.g., lecture) and those that involve more active teaching (e.g., student learning activities). There have been calls for second generation research that examines how much class time should be allocated to student learni...

Introduction The goal of this study is to determine whether two commonly used generative learning activities for text-based lessons—writing a summary or creating a drawing—help students learn from a multimedia lesson involving animations with short text captions without prior training in the generative activities. Methods Students viewed a series...

Background: The viewing perspective effect refers to the finding that students learn better from instructional videos recorded from first-person perspective than third-person perspective, but little is known about the neural mechanism underlying this effect. Aims: This study investigates the underlying neural mechanism of the viewing perspective ef...

A substantial amount of media comparison research has been conducted in the last decade to investigate whether students learn Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) content better in immersive virtual reality (IVR) or more traditional learning environments. However, a thorough review of the design and implementation of conventiona...

Although gesturing onscreen instructors are widely included in video lectures, it is still unclear whether, when, and how they are conducive to learning. To clarify this issue, we conducted a set of three-level meta-analyses of 662 effect sizes from 83 articles, spanning Web of Science, PsycINFO, ERIC, Education Research Complete, ProQuest Disserta...

The study reported in the paper focused on applying a set of affective body gestures extracted from the Geneva Multimodal Emotion Portrayals (GEMEP) dataset to two pedagogical animated agents in an online lecture context and studying the effects of those gestures on subjects’ perception of the agents’ emotions. 131 participants completed an online...

Immersive virtual reality (IVR) is being incorporated into education, but not all learners have expertise in using this technology. As such, this research examined whether pre-training in IVR can reduce the novelty of this technology and enhance learning from IVR lessons and understand the role of individual differences in managing incoming informa...

Background Although adding embodied instructors on the screen is considered an effective way to improve online multimedia learning, its effectiveness is still controversial. The level of realism of embodied onscreen instructors may be an influencing factor, but it is unclear how it affects multimedia learning. Aims We explored whether and how embo...

Background Two generative learning activities aimed at improving students' learning are explaining learning materials to oneself or to others. Although these techniques have been shown to improve learning outcomes, there is less evidence concerning the role of brain activity during learning. Aims This study explored the effects of these techniques...

This study examined whether having the instructor wear a mask during a video lecture affects learning. In Experiment 1, college students watched an instructional video on the formation of lightning, in which an instructor who either did or did not wear a mask as she stood next to slides and lectured. Learners' learning outcomes did not differ signi...

Background Immersive virtual reality (IVR) is a new technology that could motivate learners, but also could contain distracting elements that increase cognitive demands on learners. In contrast, learning with conventional media, such as a narrated slideshow could be less motivating, but also less distracting. Objectives This experiment investigate...

This study investigated the effectiveness of visual training or verbal training on how to use a text‐picture processing strategy for learning from computer‐based multimedia instructional material. Sixty‐nine university students were randomly assigned to the verbal training group (students received text‐based instruction for a text‐picture processin...

In multimedia learning, there is a lot of new information that learners are exposed to, making it a cognitively intensive process. Poorly-designed multimedia lessons can introduce distractions that must be dealt with by the learner. However, learners do not all share the same skill at managing incoming information or holding capacity, which could c...

This study examined how well people can recognize and relate to animated pedagogical agents of varying ethnicities/races and genders. For both Study 1 (realistic-style agents) and Study 2 (cartoon-style agents), participants viewed brief video clips of virtual agents of varying racial/ethnic categories and gender types and then identified their rac...

The instructor’s eye gaze can serve as an important social cue in video lectures. The current study used two sets of three-level meta-analyses to explore the effects of the instructor’s guided gaze or the instructor’s direct gaze on learning outcomes, fixation time, perception of parasocial interaction, and cognitive load. A total of eight meta-ana...

Previous research showed that the parents acknowledged the technology's benefits for their young children's learning, however, they are still worried about the extended screen time, lack of physical activity and lack of social interactions. To address these concerns, we developed Kid Space to enable pedagogically appropriate technology use for chil...

The spatial contiguity principle is that people learn and perform better when corresponding printed text and graphics are placed near rather than far from each other on the screen or page. This is a well-established design principle in multimedia learning. However, there is insufficient research to establish the appropriate distance between text an...

What is the effect on students’ learning of converting a narrated slideshow with simple line drawings (original group) into one in which the key elements are rendered as colorful cartoon-like characters (cartoon group)? We conducted two between-subjects experiments in which the narrator’s voice in both groups was a computer-generated female happy v...

Learning-by-teaching is a generative learning strategy in which students are asked to teach what they are learning to others (Fiorella & Mayer, 2015). In this study, college students watched a multimedia lesson on chemical synaptic transmission with instructions that afterward they would explain the materials by making a lecture video (teach-to-cam...

Background Learning‐by‐teaching is a generative learning strategy in which students are told they will have to teach what they are learning to others. Although learning‐by‐teaching has been shown to be effective in some cases, few studies have established guidelines for how to optimize the benefits of learning‐by‐teaching as a generative learning s...

Learning from printed text is a central academic task that may be challenging for students. Two ways to improve learning from text are to encourage learners to engage in generative learning strategies while reading, such as constructing an outline, or for instructors to include effective instructional design features, such as providing an outline w...

How does the emotional tone (happy or sad) and gender (male or female) of the instructor’s computer-generated voice in a multimedia lesson affect learning processes and outcomes for female learners (Experiment 1) and male learners (Experiment 2)? In two experiments, college students viewed a 2.5 min narrated slideshow on the formation of lightning...

Background How to improve learning with online multimedia lessons has attracted widespread concern. Prior studies have attempted to help students learn by breaking a video lesson into several segments. However, there has been a debate about whether learners can use pause time effectively and whether prompting them to engage in different types of ge...

Two experiments examined the effects of a pedagogical agent's (PA's) pointing gestures, eye gaze, and eye contact on learning processes (measured by learners' eye fixations on relevant elements) and learning outcomes (as measured by retention and transfer test scores) with a multimedia lesson on neural transmission. In Experiment 1, having the PA l...

Can people learn cognitive skills by playing video games at home? In the present study, college students took a pretest consisting of four cognitive tasks and 2 weeks later took a posttest consisting of the same four tasks (i.e., n-back and letter-number tasks tapping executive function skills and mental rotation and multiple object tracking tasks...

This study describes and investigates the immersion principle in multimedia learning. A sample of 102 middle school students took a virtual field trip to Greenland via a head mounted display (HMD) or a 2D video as an introductory lesson within a 6-lesson inquiry-based climate change intervention. The HMD group scored significantly higher than the v...

Can immersive virtual reality (IVR) serve as an effective venue for learning and training? The promise of learning in IVR lies in its affordances for motivating learners to engage in generative processing (i.e., cognitive processing aimed at making sense of the material). The pitfall of learning in IVR is that it can distract learners so they engag...

The present study examines the existing published research about the effectiveness of learner-generated highlighting and instructor-provided highlighting on learning from text. A meta-analysis was conducted of scientifically rigorous experiments comparing the learning outcomes (i.e., performance on memory and/or comprehension tests) of students (i....

This study examined the impacts of adding emotional design features to a multimedia lesson (color alone, anthropomorphism alone, or color & anthropomorphism together) on college students’ affective processes (measured by ratings of experienced emotion during learning), cognitive processes (measured by eye-tracking metrics), and learning outcomes (m...

This study investigates the positivity principle-the idea that people respond more positively and learn better from an instructor who displays positive emotion than from an instructor who displays negative emotion-and the equivalence hypothesis-the idea that learners respond similarly to the emotional tone displayed by both human and virtual instru...

Digital and online learning is more prevalent than ever, making multimedia learning a primary objective for many instructors. The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning examines cutting-edge research to guide creative teaching methods in online classrooms and training. Recognized as the field's major reference work, this research-based handbook...

Social cues can create a sense of partnership between learners and the instructor, which then motivates learners to engage in generative processing. The personalization principle is that people learn better when multimedia lessons are presented in a conversational or polite style, rather than a formal or direct style. The voice principle is that pe...

Generative learning involves actively making sense of the learning material by engaging in activities for organizing the material and integrating it with one’s existing knowledge. This chapter explores activities that support generative learning from multimedia lessons: verbalizing, visualizing, and enacting. Verbalizing activities involve generati...

Multimedia learning is learning from words and pictures. The rationale for studying multimedia learning is that people can learn more deeply from words and pictures than from words alone. A goal of research on multimedia learning is to understand how to design multimedia learning environments that promote meaningful learning. The research base conc...

Extraneous processing occurs when suboptimal instructional design causes learners to engage in cognitive processing irrelevant to the instructional goal. This chapter explores five principles for reducing extraneous processing in multimedia learning: coherence, signaling, redundancy, spatial contiguity, and temporal contiguity. The coherence princi...

When a multimedia lesson containing complicated material is presented at a fast pace, the result can be a form of cognitive overload called essential overload. Three multimedia design methods intended to minimize essential overload are the segmenting, pre-training, and modality principles. The segmenting principle is that people learn more deeply w...

Background With the rapid popularization of e‐learning, how to improve online learning has aroused widespread concern. A human‐like pedagogical agent (PA) that displays eye gaze and gestures, is often added to online multimedia lessons to increase social connection and improve learning in e‐learning environments. However, there has been a debate ab...

We compare the perceived naturalness of character anima-tions generated using three interpolation methods: linear Euler, spherical linear quaternion, and spherical spline quaternion. While previous work focused on the mathematical description of these interpolation types, our work studies the perceptual evaluation of animated upper body character g...

Generative learning theory posits that learners engage more deeply and produce better learning outcomes when they engage in selecting, organizing, and integrating processes during learning. The present experiments examine whether the generative learning activity of generating explanations can be extended to online multimedia lessons and whether pro...

The present study examines whether playing a video game can help improve cognitive skills needed for successful performance on cognitive tasks, such as updating , which involves continuous monitoring of incoming information that results in rapid addition or deletion of information in working memory. For example, in the n-back task, the participant...

The positivity principle states that people learn better from instructors who display positive emotions rather than negative emotions. In two experiments, students viewed a short video lecture on a statistics topic in which an instructor stood next to a series of slides as she lectured and then they took either an immediate test (Experiment 1) or a...

This study examines an aspect of the role of emotion in multimedia learning, i.e., whether participants can recognize the instructor’s positive or negative emotion based on hearing short clips involving only the instructor’s voice just as well as also seeing an embodied onscreen agent. Participants viewed 16 short video clips from a statistics lect...

The shift in learning environments due to the COVID-19 pandemic necessitates a closer look at course design, faculty approaches to teaching, and student interaction, all of which may predict learner achievement and satisfaction. Transitioning to an online environment requires the reinvention, reimagining, and applying of “e-flavors” of general lear...

A relatively new technology being used to deliver academic lessons is immersive virtual reality (IVR). This study examined whether IVR is a more effective instructional medium than other multimedia, such as a video on a computer monitor. Additionally, this study explored the underlying affective and cognitive mechanisms of learning in an immersive...

Drawing on research conducted by Mayer (2020), this article examines evidence-based principles for how to design effective instructional videos and shows how they are grounded in cognitive theories of learning and instruction. Principles include multimedia (present words and graphics), coherence (avoid extraneous material in slides and script), sig...

Gwakkamole is a focused video game designed to train the executive function skill of inhibition in young adolescents and has been shown to be enjoyable and challenging for them. This study examined whether the game was also enjoyable and challenging as well as effective for a different age cohort (i.e., young adults). According to the cognitive the...

In this study, we investigate whether the affective state (happy or bored) of a human or virtual instructor in an instructional video on statistics yields different learning processes and outcomes. The positivity principle states the emotional state of the instructor is recognized by students (hypothesis 1) and affects their emotional state (hypoth...

The paper reports progress on an NSF-funded project whose goal is to research and develop multimodal affective animated pedagogical agents (APA) for different types of learners. Although the preponderance of research on APA tends to focus on the cognitive aspects of online learning, this project explores the less-studied role of affective features....

There has been much research on the effectiveness of animated pedagogical agents in an educational context, however there is little research about how the emotions they display contribute to a learner’s understanding of the lesson. The positivity principle suggests that learners should learn better from instructors with positive emotions compared t...

Students' learning from an instructional video could be affected by the instructor's emotional stance during a lesson. A first step in investigating this emotional design hypothesis is to determine whether students perceive the emotions displayed by an instructor during an instructional video. Building on Russell’s (1980, 2003) model of core affect...

We compare the perceived naturalness of character animations generated using three interpolation methods: linear Euler, spherical linear quaternion, and spherical spline quaternion. While previous work focused on the mathematical description of these interpolation types, our work studies the perceptual evaluation of animated upper body character ge...

There is a growing demand for online courses but there are few validated practices to guide instructors on how to design and deliver effective online lessons. This study investigates whether an instructor’s facing direction and eye gaze behavior can be used as cues to support student engagement, attention, and learning. Access to the instructor’s e...

This classroom experiment investigates the effects of adding representational pictures to multiple-choice and constructed-response test items to understand the role of the response format for the multimedia effect in testing. Participants were 575 fifth- and sixth-graders who answered 28 science test items - seven items in each of four experimental...

One of the most common technology-enhanced items used in large-scale K-12 testing programs is the drag-and-drop response interaction. The main research questions in this study are: (a) Does adding a drag-and-drop interface to an online test affect the accuracy of student performance? (b) Does adding a drag-and-drop interface to an online test affec...

One approach to encourage productive study strategies is to incorporate preparatory quizzes (or pre‐quizzes) in which students are required to submit answers to questions before the underlying material is covered in class. In the present study, students took an introductory mechanical engineering class that either included pre‐quizzes (treatment gr...

The goal of this study is to test the individual and combined effects of supplementing an online statistics lesson with four motivational strategies corresponding to Bandura’s (1997) four sources of self-efficacy (anxiety coping, modeling, mental practice, and effort feedback) on cognitive, motivational, and affective outcomes. Internet participant...

In this study, three experiments were conducted to explore whether adding eye movement modeling examples (EMME) to a short narrated animation could facilitate visual processing during multimedia learning and learning outcomes, and whether the effects of EMME depended on the pace of lesson or prior knowledge level of the learners. In Experiment 1, c...

This study examined the impacts of 2 different graphic organizers (filled-in graphic organizers and interactive graphic organizers) on middle school students’ learning processes, outcomes, experiences, and preferences. In Experiment 1, 60 students were assigned to read a short expository passage in 1 of 3 conditions: text-only, filled-in graphic or...

As immersive virtual reality (IVR) systems proliferate in classrooms, it is important to understand how they affect learning outcomes and the underlying affective and cognitive processes that may cause these outcomes. Proponents argue that IVR could improve learning by increasing positive affective and cognitive processing, thereby supporting impro...

Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) is being used for educational virtual field trips (VFTs) involving scenarios that may be too difficult, dangerous or expensive to experience in real life. We implemented an immersive VFT within the investigation phase of an inquiry‐based learning (IBL) climate change intervention. Students investigated the consequenc...

Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) is being used for educational virtual field trips (VFTs) involving scenarios that may be too difficult, dangerous, or expensive to experience in real life. We implemented an immersive VFT within the investigation phase of an inquiry-based learning (IBL) climate change intervention. Students investigated the consequen...