Personalization Principle

Overview

Identified as an advanced principle of the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning, the Personalization Principle hypothesizes that having narrated and textual personalized messages integrated into learning material could likely lead to more meaningful learning than messages that are not personalized (Moreno & Mayer, 2000, 2004). Furthermore, it is theorized that the addition of personalized messages that are relevant to the learning material, and that are thoughtfully designed to exclude extraneous elements (ex. seductive details) minimizing cognitive load, will foster greater generative processing of the knowledge to be learned in the learner. It is thought that personalization helps the learner perceptually place themselves into the learning task as a participant. Through the affective and motivational processes of relatedness and perceptions of ownership of learning, they could become more invested in the learning tasks and material leading to more active processing of the new information. CATLM (Moreno, 2005; Moreno & Mayer , 2007).

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Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning ta da!

Evidence

In a series of experiments conducted by Mareno and Mayer in 2000, and 2004, two groups were tasked to play the educational botany game Design-a-Plant (Lester, Stone, & Stelling, 1999), read or listen to a explanation on how lightning occurs, and listen to a narration about the lungs. In each study, participants were split into the groups of personalized (experimental and non-personalized (control) of the multimedia content).The results showed that in all ten experiments, the experimental group with personalized messages outperformed the control group with no personalized messages on a transfer test, altogether averaging a median score of 1.30 (significantly large effect).