Mayer's Pre-Training Principle

This video explains Dr. Richard E. Mayer's Pre-Training Principle, one of his Multimedia Design Principles for designing more effective learning experiences.

For the Pre-Training Principle, Dr. Mayer's research found that learning is more effective when the learners are introduced with a high-level overview of the concepts before taking a deeper dive into the learning. Applying the pre-training principle allows learners to get familiar with the terminology and concepts of the subject matter before getting into the more cognitively challenging stuff.

Ponder This: If you've ever assembled a piece of ikea flat-pack furniture, you've probably cursed their word-less assembly instructions as you tried to decipher the sometimes cryptic visuals. Now try to imagine how much harder it would be if they didn't include a parts list for the furniture at the beginning of instruction sheet. And then imagine you had no idea what the furniture was supposed to look like when it was assembled. Well, that's what your learning experiences can feel like to your learners if you don't apply the pre-training principle.

Mayer's Principles for Managing Essential Processing

This is one of Dr. Mayer's principles related to the instructional goal of "managing essential processing" when designing multimedia learning experiences.

Once we've gone through applying Mayer's principles related to reducing extraneous processing (i.e. getting rid of the junk and focusing the learner's attention on the important information), we still have to be careful about not overwhelming learners with information. If we don't, we run the serious risk of causing a "cognitive overload" for the learner.

Our brains are already inundated with sensory information coming from every direction in the world we live in... add that on top of the multimedia information we're trying to teach our learners. Try to imagine all that sensory information coming at us like a fire hose. We can get easily overpowered by it without carefully managing the flow coming at us. And that's where these principles come in... to manage the flow of information and prevent cognitive overload.