Narrated Presentation & Learning Log

Topic & Audience

For this presentation, I focused on the Learning Styles Myth, which is discussed in Clark and Mayer’s Chapter 8. This presentation is designed for teachers and instructional designers who make decisions about how multimedia learning materials are created.

How This Demonstrates the Modality & Redundancy Principles
In this presentation, I intentionally used spoken narration to accompany visuals, rather than displaying large amounts of printed text. This follows the Modality Principle, which states that learners understand visuals more effectively when they are paired with narration rather than on-screen text. Presenting visuals with spoken explanation divides processing across the visual and auditory channels, reducing cognitive load.

Additionally, I avoided using identical on-screen text that repeated the narration, which aligns with the Redundancy Principle. Clark and Mayer explain that when the same words are presented simultaneously in both audio and on-screen text, the learner’s visual channel can become overloaded, since they must process both the printed text and the graphics at the same time. This unnecessary duplication can interfere with meaningful learning.

Finally, the content itself challenges the widespread belief that instruction should be customized to visual or auditory “learning styles.” Research shows that matching instruction to learning styles does not improve learning. Instead, effective multimedia instruction is guided by cognitive processing limits, not learning preferences. Designing with the Modality and Redundancy Principles helps ensure that learning materials support deeper understanding rather than cognitive overload.