How Do We Learn?
During this week of study, I found Mayer’s theory of Contiguity Principles to be the most intuitive for me. As a student, I always try to find more efficient learning methods. When I encounter diagrams or images in the learning process, I want them to be well organized rather than a way that I need to spend more time looking at them to understand them.
On the other hand, I sincerely appreciate the redundancy principle in describing examples. When creating slides or copy, I strive for perfection or refinement, which can lead to repetition or unimportant extra content. This kind of behavior puts extra pressure and load on the reader.
I have a hobby of building websites. In UI design, I often make it too complex and repetitive, which can create visual clutter. Sometimes the reason for over-design is that I try to anticipate new features that may be needed in the future. In fact, this concern for future needs creates unnecessary redundancy in the existing design. As a result, I was occasionally forced to use free templates to solve this website design problem.
In the week 2 Read/Watch study, the four videos illustrating Maier’s theory implement the redundancy principle well. They use more graphics and narratives to explain the substance of the corresponding principle while avoiding additional text for repetitive descriptions.
References
Mayer, R. E. (Ed.). (2014). Principles for Reducing Extraneous Processing in Multimedia Learning, from The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press
Margot, A (2019). Cognitive psychology in UX design: Minimising the cognitive load.
https://medium.com/@AlesioM/cognitive-psychology-in-ux-minimising-the-cognitive-load-d97ad8e3115b
Hi Flamma,
I agree that the redundancy principle is very important and I also think that it needs to be considered as one of the necessary features when designers of contents are creating learning pieces. I think being concise and clear in the content would greatly help the learners focus on the key points presented.
On the other hand, learning contents would sometimes include a lot of key points and redundancy sometimes seem unavoidable. What would you do to this situation when you are building a website if you need to present many points? Thank you.
Qiaoyang