When less is more: Meaningful learning from visual and verbal summaries of textbook lessons

In a series of 3 experiments, college students who read a summary that contained a sequence of short captions with simple illustrations depicting the main steps in the process of lightning recalled these steps and solved transfer problems as well as or better than students who received the full text along with the summary or the full text alone. In Experiment 2, taking away the illustrations or the captions eliminated the effectiveness of the summary. In Experiment 3, adding text to the summary reduced its effectiveness. Implications for a cognitive theory of multimedia learning are discussed; implications for instructional design pertain to the need for conciseness, coherence, and coordination in presenting scientific explanations. Consider the following scenario. A student who is inex-perienced in meteorology reads a textbook lesson explain-ing the cause-and-effect chain of events involved in how lightning storms develop. The explanation is clearly con-tained within the 600 words and five illustrations of the lesson. A few minutes later, we ask the student to writ