A colleague once said to me, “Miguel, you like to write! Facilitating online courses should be a breeze for you since you like to write in those forums!” I thought she was right until I read this at Making Change:

wordiness can hurt learning

The study compared three lessons about the same weather process. All lessons used the same illustrations but varied in the number of words.

The lesson with the fewest words resulted in the most learning.

Source: Efficiency in Learning as cited by Cathey Moore at Making Change

Other findings:

• Providing a lengthy verbal explanation does NOT fulfill instructors’ responsibility to provide information to the learner. This is because the practice is not efficient for learners, presumably because students do not process information effectively.
• Summaries enable students to carry out cognitive processes necessary for meaningful learning.
• Verbal summary is not as effective as a multimedia summary that combines both visual and verbal formats.
• A multimedia summary is more effective when it contains a small amount of text rather than a large amount.
• Multimedia summaries are effective when they meet 3 criteria:
  1-Conciseness – only a few illustrations or sentences presented
  2-Coherence – images and sentences are presented in cause-n-effect sequence
  3-Coordination – images presented had a verbal caption.

var addthis_pub=”mguhlin”;

Subscribe to Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org

Be sure to visit the ShareMore! Wiki.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure