Optimising the learningexperienceMayer RE. Applying the science of

learning to medical education. Med Educ

2010;44:543–549.

Clinical teachers tend to justget on with the business of train-ing their proteges without payingmuch regard to the educationaltheories that underpin the pro-cess. Occasionally, however, thework of the clinical teacher can beenlivened by a clear explanation ofwhat’s going on beneath the sur-face. Mayer from the University ofCalifornia in Santa Barbara hasprovided a useful overview of the‘science of learning’, and thenlinked it to the ‘science of in-struction’. ‘Instruction’ is differ-entiated from ‘learning’ by theactive role the teacher takes inhelping people learn.

The paper focuses particularlyon multimedia learning, or learn-ing from both words and pictures.Mayer explains that words (eitherwritten or spoken, or both) andpictures are delivered into alimited memory space via separatechannels, and then need to becognitively processed. Thisprocessing involves organisingthe material into a useful formand then integrating it withknowledge that is already storedin long-term memory. A reason-able analogy is of a factoryreceiving raw material from twodifferent suppliers, refining it andcombining it with other materialsalready on hand to produce thefinished item. Overloading thesupply routes will quickly clog the‘factory’s’ machinery, which isdescribed as a series of threememories: sensory, working andlong-term. Whereas sensorymemory only holds an image forless than a quarter of a second,working memory retains a slightly

more processed form for less than30 seconds, and acts as a signifi-cant bottleneck in the machineryas it attempts to pass the materialon to long-term memory forintegration and storage.

Clinical teachers who usemultimedia teaching tools (suchas the ubiquitous POWERPOINT)would do well to consider thefinite capacity of their learners’working memories, and whetherthey are being overloaded withextraneous words and pictures.Based on the cognitive principleshe describes, Mayer’s article givessome useful guidelines on how toconstruct multimedia presenta-tions for maximum educationaleffect. Some are no surprise, suchas avoiding too much flashyanimation or dramatic picturesthat just swamp the audience’sworking memory. Others includeensuring that your material ad-heres to the coherence principle

(excluding extraneous materialsuch as coloured photographswhen a line drawing will dobetter), the signalling principle(such as giving numbered stepswhen describing a process), andthe contiguity principle (e.g.keeping text in close proximity tothe image it is describing).

The article closes with someinteresting comments on compu-ter-based multimedia learningpackages. Mayer presents researchdata to support the contentionthat learners will make best senseof such packages when the wordspresented are enhanced by appro-priate pictures, when the wordsare personalised towards the userrather than being abstracted, andwhen the voice used is recognisa-bly human and conversational,rather than robotic. Readers whogrew up watching television ro-bots in ‘Dr Who’ or ‘Lost in Space’will no doubt agree.

Clinical teachers… would do

well to considerthe finite

capacity of theirlearners’working

memories

216 � Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010. THE CLINICAL TEACHER 2010; 7: 215–218