Journal of Educational Psychology 1996, Vol. 88, No.

1,64-73

Copyright 1996 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-0663/96/$3.00

When Less Is More: Meaningful Learning From Visual and Verbal Summaries of Science Textbook Lessons
Richard E. Mayer, William Bove, Alexandra Bryman, Rebecca Mars, and Lene Tapangco
University of California, Santa Barbara In a series of 3 experiments, college students who read a summary that contained a sequence of short captions with simple illustrations depicting the main steps in the process of lightning recalled these steps and solved transfer problems as well as or better than students who received the full text along with the summary or the full text alone. In Experiment 2, taking away the illustrations or the captions eliminated the effectiveness of the summary. In Experiment 3, adding text to the summary reduced its effectiveness. Implications for a cognitive theory of multimedia learning are discussed; implications for instructional design pertain to the need for conciseness, coherence, and coordination in presenting scientific explanations. such as by answering transfer questions. By helping students, we mean a modification to the textbook lesson, such as the use of a summary presented in words and illustrations. The goal of this article is to examine an instructional technique as a candidate for promoting student understanding of scientific explanations, namely, the use of a special kind of summary that combines visual and verbal information. During the past decade, researchers have increasingly demonstrated the role of illustrations in improving the understandability of textbook passages (Houghton & Willows, 1987; Mandl & Levin, 1989; Schnotz & Kulhavy, 1994; Willows & Houghton, 1987); in particular, researchers have demonstrated the value of combining text captions with illustrations to create annotated illustrations (Bernard, 1990; Guri-Rozenblit, 1988). Following Levin's (1982) taxonomy of illustrations, Mayer (1993) showed that the type of illustration best suited for summarizing a scientific explanation is an explanative illustration: a sequence of frames depicting the major steps in a process, such as the stages in the formation of lightning. Furthermore, in a systematic series of studies, explanative illustrations were most effective in promoting retention and transfer when they included concise captions describing each frame in words (Mayer, 1989; Mayer & Gallini, 1990; Mayer et al., 1995). In short, previous research has established the value of a series of annotated illustrations as an adjunct to a text passage; the current study takes this work one step further by examining whether a series of annotated illustrations constitutes a useful summary that, instead of serving as an adjunct to text, can stand alone. The main focus of this study is on what can be called a multimedia summary: a sequence of annotated illustrations depicting the steps in a process. For example, Figure 1 presents a summary of the cause-and-effect explanation for the process of lightning. The essential elements of this summary are that (a) the explanation is presented in a short sequence of simple illustrations depicting the major steps in the process; (b) the explanation is presented in a short sequence of brief sentences describing the major steps in the 64

Consider the following scenario. A student who is inexperienced in meteorology reads a textbook lesson explaining the cause-and-effect chain of events involved in how lightning storms develop. The explanation is clearly contained within the 600 words and five illustrations of the lesson. A few minutes later, we ask the student to write down the explanation (as a retention test) and to solve some problems that require using the explanation from the lesson (as a transfer test). For example, as a transfer problem, we ask the student to write an explanation for why there can be clouds in the sky but no lightning. Despite exerting considerable effort, the student performs poorly on both the retention and the transfer task, indicating a lack of understanding of the process of lightning. Unfortunately, this is not a made-up example, but rather reflects a pattern of results obtained frequently in our research laboratory at Santa Barbara (Mayer, Steinhoff, Bower, & Mars, 1995). Students can carefully read a textbook lesson that contains a scientific explanation, and yet not be able to remember the explanation adequately or to use it to solve problems. Given the importance of textbooks as a commonly used vehicle for promoting student learning, evidence of students' difficulties in learning from text is particularly disturbing (Britton, Woodward, & Binkley, 1993; Driscoll, Moallem, Dick, & Kirby, 1994; Garner, 1992). This predicament raises the question of how to help students understand scientific explanations. By scientific explanations, we mean cause-and-effect descriptions of a process, such as the step-by-step description of the process of how lightning develops. By understanding, we mean the ability to apply what is learned to solving new problems, Richard E. Mayer, William Bove, Alexandra Bryman, Rebecca Mars, and Lene Tapangco, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Richard E. Mayer, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106. Electronic mail may be sent via Internet to mayer@psych.ucsb.edu.

LEARNING FROM SUMMARIES

65

Brand

tepped leader

Upward-moving

1. Warm moist air rises, water vapor condenses and forms cloud. iwndrafts

4. Two leaders meet, negatively charged particles rush from cloud to ground.

2. Raindrops and ice crystals drag air downward.

5. Positively charged particles from the ground rush upward along the same path.

Positively [ed particles

Negatav charged particles

3. Negatively charged particles fall to bottom of cloud.

learning (Mayer & Anderson, 1991, 1992; Mayer et al., 1995), which is based on elements of dual-coding theory (Clark & Paivio, 1991; Paivio, 1990), cognitive-load theory (Mousavi, Low, & Sweller, 1995; Sweller & Chandler, 1994; Sweller, Chandler, Tierney, & Cooper, 1990), and generative theory (Wittrock, 1974, 1989). As summarized in Figure 2, a cognitive theory of multimedia learning is based on the idea that meaningful learning requires that the learner engage in five active cognitive processes: selecting words, selecting images, organizing words, organizing images, and integrating words and images. The cognitive process of selecting words involves building a mental representation in verbal working memory of the basic propositions in the explanation, such as "negatively-charged particles fall to bottom of cloud." The cognitive process of selecting images involves building a mental representation in visual working memory of the basic images in the explanation such as an image of a cloud with negative signs toward the bottom. The cognitive process of organizing words involves building internal connections among the propositions such that the statement "negatively charged particles fall to bottom of cloud" follows "ice crystals drag air downward" and is followed by "negatively charged particles rush from cloud to ground." The cognitive process of organizing images involves building internal connections among the images such that an image of negative charges in the bottom of a cloud is followed by an image of negative charges moving from the bottom of the cloud toward the ground, which is followed by an image of positive charges moving from the ground toward the bottom of the cloud. Finally, the cognitive process of integrating involves building external connections between a proposition such as "negatively charged particles fall to bottom of cloud" and a corresponding image such as of negative charges at the bottom of a cloud. The cognitive rationale for conciseness is that a concise summary allows the learner to select the relevant words and images. By paying attention to the relevant material, the learner is able to build verbal and visual mental representations of the major states of the system. The cognitive rationale for coherence is that a coherent summary allows the learner to organize the relevant words and the relevant images into respective cause-and-effect chains. By organizing the relevant material, the learner is able to build connections among the pieces of verbal information, yielding a verbal model, and to build connections among the pieces of visual information, yielding a visual model. Finally, the cognitive rationale for coordination is that a coordinated summary allows the learner to build connections between the visual and verbal representations of the process. In summary, this study addresses three kinds of questions: philosophical, instructional, and cognitive. The philosophical question is, What is scientific explanation? For purposes of this study, a scientific explanation is a cause-and-effect description of a sequential process, such as the steps in the formation of lightning as represented in Figure 1. The instructional question is, How can instruction help students understand a scientific explanation? The focus of this study is a straightforward instructional device that has been shown

Figure 1. A multimedia summary of the process of lightning. process; and (c) the visual and verbal explanations are coordinated so that each visual illustration contains a corresponding verbal caption. The essential features of this summary are that it is (a) concise, (b) coherent, and (c) coordinated. A summary is concise if the visual explanation is presented using only a small number of simple illustrations and the verbal explanation is presented using only a small number of words. Furthermore, a summary is concise if these explanations refer only to a small number of the parts and actions in the system, namely, the parts and actions that are essential for the explanation. A summary is coherent if the visual and verbal explanations are each given as sequential cause-andeffect chains and a change in the state of one part of the system is clearly related to a change in the state of another part of the system. A summary is coordinated if each step in the explanation is presented in visual form and verbal form so that corresponding illustrations and words are presented together. The theoretical rationale for these three features of summaries can be found in a cognitive theory of multimedia

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MAYER, BOVE, BRYMAN, MARS, AND TAPANGCO

SUMMARY: "negatively charged particles fall to bottom of cloud" _ | STEPl: SELECT WORDS STEP 2: SELECT IMAGES

fall (negatively charged particles, bottom of cloud)

VERBAL WORKING MEMORY

VISUAL WORKING MEMORY

STEP 3: ORGANIZE WORDS STEP 4: ORGANIZE IMAGES

drag (ice crystals, air (downward))

fall (negatively charged particles, bottom of cloud) VERBAL WORKING MEMORY VISUAL WORKING MEMORY

STEP 5: INTEGRATE WORDS AND IMAGES

drag (ice crystals, air (downward))

1 T
fall (negatively charged particles, bottom of cloud) VERBAL WORKING MEMORY VISUAL WORKING MEMORY

Figure 2. A cognitive theory of multimedia learning.

to have some potential in promoting retention and transfer of scientific explanations, namely, a summary in the form of a sequence of annotated illustrations as exemplified in Figure 1. The cognitive question is, Why do annotated illustrations help students understand scientific explanations? The theoretical framework used to address this question is a cognitive theory of multimedia learning that involves the selecting, organizing, and integrating of visual and verbal representations.

Experiment 1
Previous research has identified an effective technique for helping students understand scientific textbook explanations of how a cause-and-effect system works: adding a brief summary of the steps in the process depicted by a series of annotated illustrations (Mayer et al., 1995). In Experiment 1, we examined whether reading a summary (summary-only group) is as effective in promoting retention and transfer performance as reading the full passage along with the summary (passage-and-summary group) or the full text without the summary (passage-only group). A no-instruc-

tion group was included to provide a baseline for comparison of retention and transfer scores. One function of annotated illustrations is to guide the learner's attention toward the verbal explanation given in the annotation, which fosters the construction of a verbal representation of the explanative material. Consequently, we predicted higher recall scores for groups that received the explanative information in annotated illustrations (i.e., summary-only and passage-and-summary groups) than groups that did not receive the explanative information presented in annotations (passage-only and no-instruction groups). A more focused prediction was that students in the summary-only group would recall more explanative information than students in the passage-and-summary group, because the summary-only students could focus their attention solely on relevant words, whereas passage-and-summary students had to read many words that were not part of the explanation. A second function of annotated illustrations is to encourage the learner to organize the material into a cause-andeffect system and to integrate the verbal and visual representations of the system. A cognitive theory of multimedia learning requires that students build representational con-

LEARNING FROM SUMMARIES nections (i.e., verbal and visual representations of the explanations) and referential connections between the visual and verbal representations. The groups that are best supported in building connections between words and pictures are those receiving annotated illustrations (summary-only and passage-and-summary groups), so we predicted these groups would outperform all others on the problem-solving transfer test. A more focused prediction was that the summary-only group would perform as well as or better than the passage-and-summary group on the problem-solving transfer test.

67

Method
Participants and design. The participants were 56 college students who lacked experience in meteorology. They were recruited from the Psychology Subject Pool at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and they fulfilled a class requirement by participating in the study. Fourteen participants served in each of four instructional groups: passage-and-summary, passage-alone, summary-alone, and no-instruction. Materials. The materials consisted of a participant questionnaire, three instructional booklets, a recall sheet, and four problemsolving transfer sheets, each typed on 8.5- X 11-in. sheets of paper. The participant questionnaire asked students to rate their knowledge of meteorology (or weather) on a 5-point scale ranging from very little to very much and to place a check mark next to each of seven items that applied to them, including the following: "I regularly read the weather maps in a newspaper," "I know what a cold front is," "I can distinguish between cumulous and nimbus clouds," "I know what a low pressure system is," "I can explain what makes the wind blow," "I know what this symbol means" (symbol for cold front), and "I know what this symbol means" (symbol for warm front). The passage-and-summary booklet consisted of two sheets arranged in a folder as facing pages in an open book. The sheets contained a 600-word passage (which we refer to as the passage) and five captioned illustrations showing how lightning works (which we refer to as the summary). The passage was created by the authors on the basis of high school science textbooks and encyclopedia entries, including the World Book Encyclopedia's (1992) entry for lightning. In addition to factual information describing the properties of lightning, the passage included a presentation of the chain of causes and effects that constitutes an explanation of how a lightning storm develops. In the summary, five illustrations depicted events in the cause-and-effect chain, such as warm moist air rising to form a cloud. Each illustration was placed next to its corresponding paragraph that described the events depicted in the illustration; each illustration contained a short caption that repeated the description of cause-and-effect events from the corresponding text in the passage (requiring 48 words for all illustrations); and each illustration contained labels that repeated key terms from the passage (requiring 30 words for all illustrations). This booklet is identical to the integrated booklet used by Mayer et al. (1995). The passage-alone booklet was identical to the passage-andsummary booklet except that the summary was deleted. The summary-alone booklet was identical to the passage-and-summary booklet except that the passage was deleted, as shown in Figure 1. The recall sheet consisted of a statement asking the student to write down an explanation of how lightning works. Each problem-solving transfer sheet contained one of the fol-

lowing four problems: (a) "What could you do to decrease the intensity of a lightning storm?" (b) "Suppose you see clouds in the sky, but no lightning. Why not?" (c) "What does air temperature have to do with lightning?" (d) "What causes lightning?" Procedure. Participants were randomly assigned to treatment groups and tested in small groups of 1 to 3 per session. Conditions were throroughly randomized with respect to time of day, time of week, and week of the academic quarter. The same experimenter administered the experiment for all participants in all conditions. All participants in a session received the same treatment. Each participant was seated in an individual booth that contained a desk and partitions on three sides. First, the participant filled out the participant questionnaire. Participants who indicated a lack of knowledge of meteorology on the participant questionnaire (i.e., those who rated their knowledge as "very little" or next to "very little" and who checked fewer than three items on the checklist) were classified as low-experience learners. Participants who were not classified as low-experience learners (n = 5) were not included in the experiment. Second, participants in the passage-and-summary, passage-alone, and summary-alone groups were given 5 min to read their corresponding instructional booklet. They were told to read carefully and that afterward they would be asked some questions about what they had read. The instructional conditions were contained in the booklets that students read silently while working independently. Participants in the no-instruction group skipped this phase of the study. Next, the booklets were collected. All participants were given the recall sheet and asked to write down all they could about how lightning works in 6 min. Finally, following instructions, participants were given 2.5 min to generate as many answers as possible for each of the four problem-solving questions, presented one at a time in the order previously indicated.

Results
Scoring. On the recall test, participants received one point for each of the major idea units they produced, even if their wording differed from the original. The eight idea units are major actions in the cause-and-effect chain and were contained both in the passage and in the summary. The eight idea units are as follows: (1) warm, moist air rises; (2) water vapor condenses (or water vapor forms clouds); (3) raindrops and ice crystals fall; (4) air is dragged downward; (5) negatively charged particles fall (or move) to the bottom of the cloud; (6) two leaders meet; (7) negatively charged particles rush (or move) from cloud to ground (or down); and (8) positively charged particles move from ground upward along the same path. On the transfer test, participants received one point for each acceptable answer on each of the four problem-solving transfer sheets, so that the total possible score was unlimited. A list of acceptable answers was established for each of the four transfer questions, although answers did not have to correspond verbatim. For example, among the acceptable answers for the first question were to add positively charged particles to the cloud and to warm up the cloud so no freezing takes place. For the second question, an acceptable answer was that the cloud was not high enough to be at the freezing level or that not enough negatively charged particles were in the cloud. For the third question, an acceptable answer was that there is a difference in temperature between

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MAYER, BOVE, BRYMAN, MARS, AND TAPANGCO

the surface and the air or that the cloud's top must be at the freezing level. For the fourth question, an acceptable answer was that a difference exists between negative and positive particles or that there is a temperature difference within the cloud. Hypothesis 1: Students who receive summaries recall more explanative information than students who do not receive summaries. The first hypothesis in Experiment 1 was that when students receive verbal summaries (i.e., captions in the illustrations) that concisely state the to-berecalled explanation, they are more likely to attend to the verbal explanation than when they do not receive verbal summaries. In our studies, the eight key explanative pieces of information are presented in the summary as well as in the passage; however, the passage contains much additional information, whereas the verbal summaries contain only the eight explanative idea units. For this reason, we expect the summaries to guide the learner's attention toward these eight explanative idea units and to encourage the learner to construct a verbal representation of the explanation. The left panel of Figure 3 shows the mean number of explanative idea units (out of eight) produced by each of the four groups. Consistent with the hypothesis, a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed significant differences among the groups, F(3, 52) = 43.05, MSE = 1.66, p < .001. Supplemental Tukey tests (with alpha at .05) indicated that students who received no instruction (noinstruction group) produced fewer explanative idea units than students in each of three groups that received a booklet to read, confirming the observation that the instructional materials contributed to student learning and that the passage-alone group did not differ significantly from the passage-and-summary group. More important, students who received the summary-alone booklet outperformed each of the other groups, indicating that in this case "less is more"; that is, students recalled more explanative information when they received the annotated illustrations alone than when they received the full text passage along with the annotated illustrations. Similar results have been obtained in other studies on text summaries (Britton, Gulgoz, & Glynn, 1993; Reder & Anderson, 1980). These results may be biased because the inclusion of the no-instruction group artificially reduced the MSE. To overcome this problem, we recomputed the foregoing ANOVA

with just three groups: passage-and-summary, summaryalone, and passage-alone. As in the previous analysis, the three groups differed significantly in number of idea units recalled, F(2, 39) = 10.97, MSE = 2.16, p < .001, and supplemental Tukey tests (with alpha at .05) revealed that the summary-alone group recalled more idea units than either of the other groups, which did not differ from one another. Overall, these results are consistent with the idea that annotated illustrations help the learner to focus on key explanative information because the explanations are presented without any distracting verbal information; even when the identical verbal explanative information is presented within the text passage, students are less likely to encode it because they attend to nonexplanative information in the text passage. In short, we interpret these results as consistent with one hypothesized function of annotated illustrations, namely, that annotated illustrations help to guide the learner's attention toward explanative information. A possible criticism of using recall as a dependent measure is that students in the passage-and-summary group may spend most of their test time writing down nonexplanative information, whereas summary-only students may spend all of their time writing down explanative information. In spite of the recall results, therefore, students in the passage-andsummary group may actually know more about the explanation than do summary-alone students. To examine this possibility, in the next subsection we focused on problemsolving transfer as the primary dependent measure for assessing students' understanding of the explanation of how lightning develops. Hypothesis 2: Students who receive summaries generate more creative solutions to problem-solving questions than students who do not receive summaries. Our second hypothesis is based on the idea that annotated illustrations help the learner to construct connections between verbal and visual representations of the explanation, which, in turn, supports problem-solving transfer. The right panel of Figure 3 shows the mean number of creative solutions generated by each group on the transfer test. Consistent with the hypothesis, a one-way analysis of variance revealed that the groups differed significantly from one another, F(3, 52) = 21.45, MSE = 3.05, p < .001. Supplemental Tukey tests (with alpha at .05) showed that students who did not receive

Explanative recall Passage-and-summary Summary-alone Passage-alone No-instruction

Problem-snlving transfer ^

1..
i i i i i

1 2 3 4 5 Mean number of idea units recalled

1 2 3 4 5 Mean number of problem solutions

Figure 3. Experiment 1: Mean number of explanative statements produced on the retention test and mean number of acceptable solutions produced on the transfer test for four treatment groups.

LEARNING FROM SUMMARIES instruction (i.e., no-instruction group) performed more poorly than those in each of the other groups; more important, the two groups who received a summary (i.e., summary-alone and passage-and-summary groups) performed better than the other groups but did not differ from one another. Again, these results may be biased because the inclusion of the no-instruction group artificially reduced the MSE. To overcome this problem, we recomputed the foregoing ANOVA with just three groups: passage-and-summary, summary-alone, and passage-alone. As in the previous analysis, the three groups differed significantly in number of creative solutions produced on the transfer test, F(2, 39) = 6.86, MSE = 4.05, p < .001, and supplemental Tukey tests (with alpha at .05) revealed that the passage-alone group produced fewer solutions than either of the other groups, which did not differ from one another. Interestingly, adding the text passage to the annotated illustrations did not increase transfer performance over simply presenting the annotated illustrations alone. Put another way, the uninstructed group generated the fewest number of solutions, the passage-alone group generated considerably more than the uninstructed group, and the two groups receiving annotated illustrations each generated approximately 100% more than the passage-alone group. This pattern of results is consistent with the prediction that a summary is as effective as a full text along with a summary in helping learners to understand a scientific explanation. Experiment 2 Experiment 1 yielded the findings that (a) a visual and verbal summary of a passage is more effective than a full passage in helping students to remember and to use an explanation of how lightning occurs and (b) a visual and verbal summary is more effective in helping students remember an explanation and just as effective in helping students use an explanation compared to the combination of a full text passage with a visual and verbal summary. The summary in Experiment 1 was a set of five annotated illustrations that contained both a visual summary (i.e., five frames of illustrations) and a verbal summary (i.e., verbal captions and labels for each illustration). In Experiment 2, we attempted to untangle the contributions of the visual and verbal aspects of the summary by asking students to read the same passage and summary as in Experiment 1, the same summary as in Experiment 1, a summary containing words only, or a summary containing illustrations only. If the effectiveness of the summary depends on the learner's construction of connections between verbal and visual explanations, as stipulated by a cognitive theory of multimedia learning, it follows that students receiving the visual-andverbal summary will perform better on transfer tests than students receiving the visual summary alone or the verbal summary alone.

69

cruited from the Psychology Subject Pool at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Seventeen students served in each of four treatment groups: passage-and-summary, summary-alone, verbal-summary-alone, and visual-summary-alone. Materials. The participant questionnaire, retention sheet, and four problem-solving transfer sheets were identical to those used in Experiment 1. The passage-and-summary booklet and the summary-alone booklet were identical to those used in Experiment 1. The verbal-summary-alone booklet was identical to the summary-alone booklet except that all illustrations were deleted; the visual-summary-alone booklet was identical to the summary-alone booklet except that all words (i.e., captions and labels) were deleted. Procedure. The procedure was identical to that used in Experiment 1 except that during the study period, students received either the passage-and-summary, summary-alone, verbal-summary-alone, or visual-summary-alone booklet.

Results and Discussion

Scoring. The retention and transfer tests were scored as in Experiment 1. Hypothesis 3: Students who receive summaries perform as well as or better than students who receive passages with summaries on tests of retention and transfer. A secondary goal of Experiment 2 was to determine whether the results of Experiment 1 could be replicated. As in Experiment 1, the summary-alone group recalled more explanative idea units than the passage-and-summary group (Ms = 5.94 and 3.45, respectively), f(32) = 4.43, p < .001. Also as in Experiment 1, the summary-alone group performed as well on the transfer test as the passage-and-summary group; in fact, in contrast to Experiment 1, the summary-alone group produced significantly more creative solutions than the passage-and-summary group (Ms = 5.00 and 3.85, respectively), f(32) = 2.06, p < .05. Taken together, the results of Experiments 1 and 2 show that a summary, in the form of annotated illustrations, can be either as effective as or more effective than a full passage combined with a summary in helping students to remember and to use a scientific explanation. Hypothesis 4: Students who receive summaries containing verbal information recall more explanative information than students who receive summaries that do not contain verbal information. The main goal of Experiment 2 was to determine whether a visual summary (i.e., a series of five illustrations depicting the major events in the process of lightning), a verbal summary (i.e., a series of five captions describing the major events in the process of lightning), or both, are needed to produce an effective summary. The left panel of Figure 4 shows the mean number of explanative idea units produced on the retention test. An analysis of variance performed on the recall data revealed that the four treatment groups differed significantly in the mean number of idea units recalled, F(3, 64) = 50.25, MSE = 2.27, p < .001. Supplemental Tukey tests (with alpha at .05) revealed that the visual-summary-alone group produced fewer explanative idea units than each of the other groups, presumably reflecting the lack of verbally presented material. More interestingly, the summary-alone and verbalsummary-alone groups produced significantly more idea

Method
Participants and design. The participants were 68 college students who lacked knowledge of meteorology and who were re-

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MAYER, BOVE, BRYMAN, MARS, AND TAPANGCO

Problefn-RQlYJnP transfer Passage-and-summary Summary-alone Verbal-summary-alone Visual-summary-alone

1 2 3 4 5 Mean number of idea units recalled

1 2 3 4 5 Mean number of problem solutions

Figure 4. Experiment 2: Mean number of explanative statements produced on the retention test and mean number of acceptable solutions produced on the transfer test for four treatment groups.

units than either of the other two groups but did not differ from one another. If the goal of instruction is solely to produce good retention of a verbal explanation, the best instructional method seems to be to provide the learner with a verbal explanation. However, as noted in the previous section, we focused on problem-solving transfer as our primary measure of understanding. Hypothesis 5: Students who receive summaries containing both visual and verbal information produce more creative solutions than students who receive summaries containing only visual or only verbal information. The right panel of Figure 4 shows the mean number of creative solutions produced on the problem-solving transfer test for each of the four treatment groups. An analysis of variance revealed that the groups differed significantly from one another in the mean number of problem solutions, F(3, 64) = 14.53, USE = 2.50, p < .001. Supplemental Tukey tests (with alpha at .05) revealed that the summary-only group did not differ significantly from the passage-andsummary group, replicating the results of Experiment 1. More important, a major new finding in Experiment 2 is that the summary-alone group outperformed both the visualsummary-alone and the verbal-summary-alone groups. We interpret these results as indicating that both verbal and visual aspects of the summary are useful in helping inexperienced learners build a coherent understanding of a scientific explanation. It is interesting that, although students in the verbal-summary-alone group remembered as much of the verbal explanation as did students in the summary-alone group, they were not as effective as the summary-alone students in applying their verbal knowledge to solve problems. If the goal of instruction is to produce good retention and transfer of scientific explanation, then the best instructional method seems to be a coordinated verbal and visual summary of the major steps in the to-be-explained process. In conclusion, the most effective summary, according to our research, is one that coordinates a verbal and visual summary of the explanation, rather than one that summarizes the explanation only in words or only in pictures. Experiment 3 Experiment 2 provided a replication of one of the major findings in Experiment 1, in which students who read a

summary performed as well as or better than students who read a full text along with a summary. In addition, the major new finding in Experiment 2 was that the positive effects of the summary occurred most strongly when both visual and verbal information were presented and not when the summary was presented solely in verbal form or solely in visual form. Thus, the results of Experiment 2 showed that taking away the illustrations or the captions from the summary reduced its effectiveness. This pattern is consistent with a cognitive theory of multimedia learning, which states that both visual and verbal representations are needed to build referential connections. When only a verbal summary is presented, an inexperienced learner may be able to generate a verbal representation but may have difficulty in constructing a visual representation on the basis of the verbal information; when only a visual summary is presented, an inexperienced learner may be able to generate a visual representation but may have difficulty in constructing a verbal representation on the basis of the visual information. In Experiment 3, we examined the effects of adding text to the captions in the summary. According to a cognitive theory of multimedia learning, adding text may disrupt the process of selecting relevant words. When extraneous text is added, the learner may have difficulty in identifying the core steps in the causal chain; this task is easier when the text consists only of the core steps in the causal chain. It follows that students who read a summary will perform better on tests of retention and transfer than will students who read a summary containing additional words.

Method
Participants and design. The participants were 39 college students who lacked experience in meteorology. They were recruited from the Psychology Subject Pool at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and they fulfilled a class requirement by participating in the study. Thirteen students served in each of three instructional groups: summary, summary-plus-50-words, summary-plus-550 words. Materials. The materials consisted of the same participant questionnaire, recall sheet, and four problem-solving transfer sheets as in Experiments 1 and 2; in addition, the materials included three instructional books: the summary booklet, a summary-plus-50-words booklet, and a summary-plus-550-words

LEARNING FROM SUMMARIES booklet. The summary booklet was identical to the one used in Experiments 1 and 2; it contained five captioned illustrations with approximately 50 words in the captions. The summary-plus-50words booklet was the same as the summary booklet except that a more in-depth description of each illustration was given in each caption, yielding a total of approximately 100 words in the captions. Like the summary captions, the expanded captions were taken verbatim from the full text passage used in Experiments 1 and 2. The expanded captions were as follows: 1. Warm moist air near the earth's surface rises. As the air in this updraft cools, water vapor condenses into water droplets and forms a cloud. The cloud's top extends beyond the freezing level, so tiny ice crystals form in the upper portion of the cloud. 2. Eventually, the ice crystals become too large to be suspended by updrafts, so they fall through the cloud. They drag air downward, producing downdrafts. When downdrafts strike the ground they produce gusts of cool wind. 3. The rising water droplets collide with the falling ice, producing electrical charges. Negatively charged particles fall to the bottom of the cloud, and positively charged particles rise to the top. 4. A negatively charged stepped leader moves downward for the cloud in a series of steps. A positively charged upwardmoving leader travels up from the trees and buildings to meet the negative charges. When the two leaders meet, negatively charged particles rush from the cloud to the ground. 5. As the leader stroke nears the ground, it induces an opposite charge. Positively charged particles from the ground rush upward along the same path. This return stroke produces the bright light that people notice in a flash of lightning. In the summary-plus-550 words booklet, the captions for the five illustrations consisted of the entire 600-word passage as used in Experiments 1 and 2. This is just like the passage-and-summary condition of the previous experiment but presented in a different format, that is, each portion of text is placed with its corresponding illustration. Procedure. The procedure was identical to that used in Experiments 1 and 2, except that during the study period, students received either the summary, summary-plus-50-words, or summary-plus-550-words booklet.

71

Results and Discussion

Scoring. The retention and transfer tests were scored as in Experiment 1.

Hypothesis 6: Students who receive concise summaries recall more explanative information than students who receive expanded summaries. A major hypothesis in Experiment 3 is that students who receive simple illustrations with brief captions depicting the steps in the process of lightning will recall those steps better than will students who receive simple illustrations with longer captions. A rationale for this prediction is that lengthy captions may overload verbal working memory so that some of the explanative information is lost. The left panel of Figure 5 shows the mean number of explanative idea units (out of eight) produced by each of the three groups on the retention test. Consistent with the hypothesis, a one-way analysis of variance revealed significant differences among the groups in mean number of explanative ideas recalled, F(2, 36) = 20.94, MSE = 2.15, p < .001. Supplemental Tukey tests (with alpha at .05) showed that the summary group produced more explanative idea units than either of the other groups, and the summary-plus50-words group produced more than the summary-plus550-words group. There is a clear pattern in which the more words added to a core verbal explanation, the more poorly the student does in producing the core explanative idea units. These results are consistent with the idea that the additional words overload verbal working memory, drawing limited attentional resources away from the core verbal explanation. An alternative is that the time constraints of the recall test allow students to write only a certain number of words and that a higher percentage of those words come from nonexplanative idea units for students in the summary-plus-50words and summary-plus-550-words groups than for students in the summary-alone group. If this alternative is correct, then all groups should perform equally well on the problem-solving test because, according to this alternative view, they all have constructed the same visual and verbal explanation. Thus, a better test of understanding involves problem-solving transfer, as explored in the next subsection. Hypothesis 7: Students who receive concise summaries generate more creative solutions to problem-solving questions than students who receive expanded summaries. The most important hypothesis in Experiment 3 is that students who receive simple illustrations with brief captions depicting the steps in the process of lightning will generate more

Explanative recall

Problem-solving transfer

Summary-plus-550-words Summary-plus-50-words Summary

1 2 3 4 5 Mean number of idea units recalled

1 2 3 4 5 Mean number of problem solutions

Figure 5. Experiment 3: Mean number of explanative statements produced on the retention test and mean number of acceptable solutions produced on the transfer test for three treatment groups.

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creative solutions to problem-solving questions than will students who receive simple illustrations with longer captions. A rationale for this hypothesis is that lengthy captions may overload verbal working memory, disrupting the process of building a verbal representation and connecting it with a visual representation of the lightning system. The right panel of Figure 5 shows the mean number of creative solutions generated by each group on the problemsolving transfer test. An analysis of variance revealed significant differences among the groups in their problemsolving performance, F(2, 36) = 3.19, MSE = 2.34, p = .05. Supplemental Tukey tests (with alpha at .05) showed that the summary group performed significantly better than the summary-plus-550-words group on the problem-solving transfer test but not better than the summary-plus-50-words group. These results are consistent with the idea that adding a lot more text to the captions can reduce students' efficiency in abstracting the core verbal explanation and in connecting it with the visual explanation.

Conclusion
When the goal of instruction is to help students be able to explain a scientific system in words (retention) and to use this explanation to solve problems (transfer), a common instructional practice is to provide a lengthy verbal explanation, such as a textbook passage or a classroom lecture. Indeed, instructors may believe that providing a lengthy verbal explanation fulfills their responsibility to provide information to the learner. Unfortunately, this practice is not very efficient for many students, presumably because students do not process the information effectively. In the present study, for example, there was no instructional treatment, including a 600-word passage with summary, that proved to be more effective in promoting retention and transfer than a summary. By reducing the load on the cognitive system, summaries may enable students to carry out the cognitive processes necessary for meaningful learning as summarized in Figure 2. Our research extends earlier research on text-based summaries (Reder & Anderson, 1980) by examining the nature of summaries that are based on both text and illustrations what can be called multimedia summaries. In particular, our research suggests that a verbal summary is not as effective as a multimedia summary that combines both visual and verbal formats and that a multimedia summary is more effective when it contains a small amount of text rather than a large amount. What constitutes an effective multimedia summary? Our multimedia summary was constructed on the basis of three criteria: conciseness, in that only a few illustrations and sentences were presented; coherence, in that the images and sentences were presented in cause-and-effect sequence; and coordination, in that the images were presented contiguously with their corresponding sentences (i.e., each illustration had a verbal caption). In Experiment 3, we varied the conciseness of the verbal explanation and found evidence that students learn more effectively from a more concise

summary. In Experiment 2, we varied the coordination and found that students learn more effectively when words and illustrations are presented together rather than separately (as a words-only or illustrations-only treatment). However, we did not directly compare presenting a coordinated multimedia summary (i.e., verbal captions with each illustration) with presenting a verbal summary on a different page from a visual summary. Furthermore, we did not vary the coherence of the summaries by presenting the illustrations and sentences in random order versus sequential order. The quality of the verbal explanation is another issue that deserves additional research attention, because well-written text may not have the same effects as poorly written text. Although we attempted to use well-written text in the 600word passage, we may not have succeeded. Therefore, additional research is needed to determine whether or not the passage-and-summary treatment would foster better results if the quality of the passage was improved. Additional limitations concern the nature of the materials, the learners, and the dependent measures. The materials consisted of a scientific explanation of a cause-and-effect process; if we had used a narrative or purely descriptive passage rather than an explanative passage, the results may have been quite different. The learners were inexperienced in the subject domain; if we had used experienced learners, we would not expect to find differences among the treatment groups. Finally, we focused on retention and transfer of the explanative information as our dependent measures; if we had focused on overall amount remembered, we would not expect to find the same kinds of differences among the groups. In short, these experiments provide new information concerning the circumstances in which a summary is effective, namely, when the material is potentially structured, when the learners do not normally identify the structure, and when the summary conveys the structure visually and verbally. Last, it would be incorrect to conclude that in all cases students can learn as much from studying a summary as from studying a full lesson along with a summary. This study provides consistent evidence of a situation in which a summary can be effective in promoting student understanding of a scientific explanation. Further research is needed to determine the role of carefully constructed multimedia summaries that are sensitive to the cognitive loads on visual and verbal working memories. References
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Received June 23, 1995 Revision received August 24, 1995 Accepted August 29, 1995