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

2.6. What We Don't Know About Learning

The study of learning has a long history in psychology, but until recently most of the research involved contrived tasks in laboratory settings such as how hungry rats learned to run a maze or how humans learned a list of words. Within the last twenty-five years, however, learning researchers have broadened their scope to include more complex kinds of learning tasks, including e-learning. What is needed is more high-quality research that is methodologically rigorous, theoretically based, and grounded in realistic e-learning situations. In short, we need research-based principles of e-learning (Mayer, 2001, 2005a). This book provides you with a progress report on research-based principles that are consistent ...