One day in November 2010, my world changed.
I was reading a book called “ E-learning and The Science of Instruction ” by Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer. The book describes evidence-based methods with a focus on designing e-learning. I read it and thought it was a pretty good book. When I got to about page 90, I read about a phenomenon called the ‘split attention effect’.
The split attention effect explains the phenomenon that if you see a text and hear a speech with the same text, you end up dividing your attention between the two sensory impressions in an unfortunate way.
Although one would think that the more senses that are addressed, the better, the split attention effect shows that one actually spends more mental energy synchronizing what one hears with what one sees than understanding the overall message.
To elaborate, the split attention effect does not say that you cannot/should not speak to multiple senses at the same time. What the split attention effect describes is that when the same information is delivered at the same time, our attention is divided, and this of course affects the understanding of what is being conveyed.
Another example of how one can receive the same information with the different senses is when we look at a pair of hands clapping, the eyes see that the hands are clapping, the ears hear the sound of a clap, and if one claps oneself, one can also feel it with the sense of touch.
In nature/reality, our sensory impressions complement each other, and it almost never happens that we receive the exact same information with different senses at the same time. Therefore, we have not evolved to be good at decoding this kind of communication.
At that time, I had spent years developing thousands of pages of e-learning, where it had been standard practice to both display the text and speak the same text. And then I read something that said it was completely wrong to do exactly that. Completely. Wrong.
I immediately googled the split attention effect, quickly found information that confirmed what the book said and raised even more questions than it answered.
I was so shaken to my core. I wasn't the only one who had developed the e-learning, so both I and my colleagues were completely convinced that this was the way to do it. Partly because that was what we had learned - it was "how everyone did it" - but also because it was supported by several theories, where the theory of learning styles in particular was a significant inspiration.
In the book, Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer also write that if one is to get only one thing out of reading the book, they hope it is that learning styles do not exist and that they cannot be used as a theoretical foundation for developing learning.
At that time, as mentioned, I had both developed a lot of learning material, but also given lectures on learning styles and knew a lot about it.
Now, one might rightly object that the theory of learning styles does not say that you should show the same text as is spoken, and that this was simply how I and my colleagues had interpreted it. And that is also true, but when I discovered that large parts of my professional understanding were wrong, it made me go into the flesh of all the underlying theories I was using at the time to investigate whether they held water.
Do you want to? learn more?
If you are interested in science and learning and brain myths, these articles will probably interest you.
- The theory of the 7 intelligences
- The brain is not divided into a creative right half and logical left half
- Myth: We only use 10% of our brains
- The theory of learning styles
If you are interested in reading more about motivation and learning, these articles may interest you.
- Self-determination theory. The most important theory you need to know about learning.
- Coercive design – how not to design e-learning .
- Which learning methods best support motivation for learning?
- Your brain is NOT a computer - Predictive Coding
- Flick 2 learn. Why Interactive elearning is NOT always exciting elearning
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