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

9.5. Psychological Reasons for the Pretraining Principle

The pretraining principle is relevant in situations in which trying to process the essential material in the lesson would overwhelm the learner's cognitive system. In these situations involving complex material, it is helpful if some of the processing can be done in advance. When you see a narrated animation on how the digestive system works, for example, you need to build a cause-and-effect model of how a change in one part of the system causes a change in the next part and so on, and you need to understand what each part does. We can help the learner understand the cause-and-effect chain by making sure the learner already knows the name and characteristics of each part. When you hear ...