Clark, Richard & Feldon, David. (2014). Five common but questionable principles of multimedia learning. The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning. 97-115. 10.1017/CBO9781139547369.009.
Clark and Feldon share the second installment of corrective action against a field of study which has been moving progressively onward since the time of Clark’s initial article entitled “Media Will Never Influence Learning.” Now the duo have brought ten self-assessed fallacies to the attention of the field of educational technology, roundly attacking multimedia-based learning. The principles can be summarized by inferiority of multimedia learning, failure to demonstrate motivation, cognitive overload of animation, failure to identify learning styles accurately, and imperfections in discovery-based learning. For each of the five questionable principles, the authors cite studies which cast light on the imperfections of the developing, but pervasive manner of educating modern learners.
The work depends upon a selective analysis of available research which is guilty of mischaracterizing the findings in favor of their own interpretation. Consultation of the original source of the research reveals that the Clark/Feldon analysis is false by way of being contrary to the explicitly-stated words of the researcher. In other examples, the definitions are used to manipulate the data. According to the authors, “If studies provide a necessary method of instruction in a multimedia condition and do not provide an equivalent form of the method in a compared instructional treatment, the results will appear to favor the multimedia when, in fact, the method influenced the learning.” The fact remains that, when there are physical vs. multimedia equivalents, using the same essential method, frequently the physical option is laborious, time-consuming, and inefficient. This is not that the multimedia lacks an equivalent, but that the alternative is far from being a recognizable option. For example, a GoogleDoc can be typed, formatted, spell-checked, grammar-checked, and peer edited in minutes, whereas an essay written on paper would require a companion physical dictionary, thesaurus, and grammar guide for reference, a peer nearby for markups, then a second copy of the essay to be prepared with all of the corrections, taking hours instead of minutes. By virtue of the complexity and tedium of the physical actions, the efficient multimedia method affords the learner a better option for an in-depth learning experience.
The fundamental benefit of this work exists in its misapplication of research to conform to a preconceived position that “media will never influence learning.” Studies are provided to support the places in which multimedia learning identifies obstacles. However, obstacles are not always permanent barriers. They may just be a method for identifying best practices in eLearning and instructional design, not by finding the perfect solution immediately, but by following the route famously attributed to Thomas Edison of finding 999 ways not to make a lightbulb, then succeeding on the 1000th attempt. In their own words in the conclusion of the article, the authors state that “Multimedia instruction offers extraordinary benefits to education including a wide range of instructional options and, with adequate instructional design, considerable reductions in the time required to learn, the time required of expert teachers, and when large numbers of students are involved, the cost of learning”.
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