Mayer's 5 Extraneous Principles by

National Geographic Kids!

slcox3 — 2016-01-23 01:56:07 UTC

Visit the website:

http://kids.nationalgeographic.com

Coherence principle

slcox3 — 2016-01-23 01:59:41 UTC

Mayer's coherence principle states that people learn better when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than included. National Geographic Kids does not have extraneous words, pictures, or sounds throughout the website. When you first look at the opening page you would assume that there are extraneous word and pictures but the words and pictures are a guide for the website. They are nicely organized without unnecessary distractions. Below is part of the home screen, it gives the different classifications of animals with a short description. There are no pictures or sound and the words included are needed to navigate and locate information needed.

Redundancy Principle

slcox3 — 2016-01-23 02:12:58 UTC

Mayer states that people learn better from animation and narration instead of animation, narration, and on-screen text. When browsing through National Geographic Kids animations and videos, I noticed most video do not include on-screen text with narration and animation but some videos do include on-screen text. Below is an example of animation, narration, and on-screen text. It does not have on-screen text for the whole video but the text shown below points out the important facts that the narrator is talking about. So in ways National Geographic Kids incorporates and ignores Mayer's Redundancy Principle.

Signaling Principle

slcox3 — 2016-01-23 02:27:01 UTC

According to Mayer, people learn better when cues highlight the organization of necessary information found in the presentation. Mayer says that multimedia designers should use signaling to call attention to important material in the lesson and how it is organized. The signaling principle is important to design because viewers can be distracted easily by extraneous material. National Geographic Kids uses signaling a few different ways throughout the website. Below is one example of signaling used in this website. This example shows headings that highlight important facts about animals.

Example 1:

Signaling Principle !!

slcox3 — 2016-01-23 02:45:16 UTC

The second example of signaling found on the website is arrows, to show how to see the next slide and navigate through the presentation. Also at the top right corner you see the expand button, which signals how to make the presentation full screen.

Spatial Contiguity Principle:

slcox3 — 2016-01-23 02:47:36 UTC

Mayer states that people learn more deeply when corresponding printed words and pictures are presented close to each other rather than far from each other on the page. National Geographic Kids does well with keeping the corresponding words and pictures close to each other. This is important especially on this website because if the words were far apart it would be easy to get lost but the designers organized the website to clearly show corresponding words and pictures. Below is an example of this principle, you can see the bloodhound and the corresponding fact right beside the picture.

Temporal Contiguity Principle

slcox3 — 2016-01-23 02:56:49 UTC

Mayer's Temporal Continguity Principles states that people learn better when corresponding pictures and narrations are presented simultaneously rather than successively. After exploring the entire website I could not find an example of this principle. There were no examples of pictures and narrations being presenting simultaneously. Although they have videos with narrations, the narrations don't relate to the graphic being seen. Therefore National Geographic Kids ignored this principle. I find this surpris because I think this is an important principle to include when thinking of children since they are learning to improve their reading skills. Having pictures and narrations presented simultaneously can improve student understanding.