The Multimedia Learning Hypothesis

Do you have a question that whether it is an advertisement or promotion that you see when you are shopping, the words and the picture are always matched together? In fact, the appearance of words or pictures alone will make people’s learning efficiency weaker.

When we were young, we did not know a lot of vocabulary, so the appearance of illustrations is the easiest to understand when we were young. Pictures are closer to reality, and can even be based on reality, closer to our cognition, and make people better understand and remember. However, the long-term understanding of pictures will lack the ability to perceive words. The text is abstract. When there is only one text, the text can broaden the thinking ability, and the text will be more thorough and specific in terms of expressive ability. The text will be experienced by different people differently, and it is easier to touch the point of meaning. It is precise because of the huge amount of text information that it will cause visual or mental fatigue. Therefore, only using text or pictures alone cannot perform well. On the contrary, using a combination of words and pictures will become more effective.

For example, in this picture, we can clearly see the principle of leverage. Picture and a short text introduction will help students understand the problem more easily.