This online summary (note that it is itself a brief summary with an illustration) of a JEdPsych article by Clark, Nguyen & Sweller appears to demonstrate that when instructional materials with less text are comparied with a comparable lesson with more text more learning results from shorter explanations. I must admit I have not read the article (I recognize one of the authors and I am guessing the explanation has to do with working memory limits in multimedia learning – hence I must rely on my existing knowledge of this field to interpret the tip offered to me as a designer).
I don’t consider myself an instructional designer, but i am an experienced writer and there is always something counterintuitive about the claim that less is more. When I write, I do not say to myself – how can I draw this out and say the same thing with more words. Writing is not so much fun that I would rather spend 4 hours than 3. What I write tends to grow longer because in examining drafts I am concerned that something that could help the reader understand was not included.
Perhaps this is one of the situations in which simple guidelines can be misleading (why practitioners need to understand why and now just what). Actually, the post itself may be a great example of a brief summary that is understandable but potentially misleading. It appears that the research materials involved content in which the explanation is carried by illustrations and the text is mostly redundant. If illustrations do a good job of conveying an explanation, adding a great deal of text to the process overloads working memory and causes a detriment in performance.
This makes sense. Now apply this same guideline to the “tip”. In the case of the tip, the illustration conveys one message (number of words and performance, but does not convey another key message “when content involves informative illustrations and text). In this case, adding some words to clarify the characteristics of the instructional materials would have been informative and potentially prevented readers from drawing faulty conclusions.
Suggesting shorter text offers a better explanation than a longer text is very different from suggesting that a secondary message should not detract from the limited capacity necessary to process the primary message.
Perhaps the message should be that adding informative illustrations is more important that adding more text.
I apologize for writing a longer analysis than the instructional design tip appearing in the original post. You really have to read both posts for my comments to make sense. You will have to judge for yourself which body of content is actually is more informative and offers a more accurate expalantion of what the study implies.
I don’t mean to pick on the author. Rather, I mean to pick on an instructional approach that encourages guidelines over understanding. What is interesting in this case is that the guideline offers a good case for the limitations of the guideline.
BTW – read the comments in response to the tip post and it is clear that readers do not understand what the research article intends. For example, the research article would not explain the benefits of Twitter (I assume the commenter proposes that Twitter is good) – Twitter does constrain the number of words but does not allow informative illustrations. Since informative illustrations are the necessary condition for the reduction is supporting text, an erroneous understanding has been generated.
