Talk:Visual-verbal integration

This page is excellent!

Things to do to improve:

• The principle as stated does not make a clear contrast. It has the form "Doing X is good" rather than "Doing X is better than Y." Here's the current statement: "Instruction that includes both visual and verbal information leads to robust learning (the development of coherent, flexible knowledge representations) when the instruction supports learners as they coordinate information from both sources and the representations guide student attention to deep features." How about: "Instruction that includes both visual and verbal information leads to more robust learning than instruction that includes verbal information along, but only when the instruction supports learners as they coordinate information from both sources and the representations guide student attention to deep features." The parenthetic statement seems to (re)define robust learning and, in any case, seems worth leaving for the more detailed description.

• Make more explicit citation to Mayer's multimedia principles, especially the multimedia principle and the contiguity principle (is that there now?). Compare and, especially, contrast the results and theory. Seems the visual-verbal integration principle as stated is a specialization of the multimedia principle because of the "only when" clause. However, a closer read of Mayer (2001) (and Clark & Mayer, 2004) is warranted to see exactly how he "conditionalizes" the principle -- he may have similar condition of applicability (though likely stated in different words).

• Other projects/studies in the Coordinative Learning matrix, which are marked as varying the visual-verbal integration, should add this page. These are the Chinese "Talking Heads" (Liu, Massaro, Dunlap, Wu, Chen,Chan, Perfetti) and "Cotraining" (Liu, Perfetti, Dunlap, Zi, Mitchell) studies.