e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning

9.4. Ensure That Learners Know the Names and Characteristics of Key Concepts

Segmenting appears to be a promising way to address the situation in which the learner is overloaded by the need to engage in essential processing—that is, the learner is overwhelmed by the amount of essential processing required to understand a complex lesson. In this section, we examine a related technique, which can be called the pretraining principle: Provide pretraining in the names and characteristics of the key concepts in a lesson. For example, before viewing a narrated animation on how the digestive system works, learners could receive pretraining in which they learn the names and locations of key body parts such as the esophagus, epiglottis, trachea, pharynx, ...