Three Rules From Richard Mayer We Apply to Every Training Slide

Who Richard Mayer Is

Richard Mayer is a cognitive psychologist who has spent decades studying how people learn from words and pictures together. His principles are well known in instructional design and still easy to break under deadline. Our own first drafts broke all three.

None of these ideas are ours. They are published research, and Mayer calls them principles, not laws: each has known exceptions. We read it, argued about it, and then changed our slides.

Rule 1: Don’t Put the Narration on the Slide (Redundancy Principle)

This is the redundancy principle: people learn better from narration and graphics than from narration, graphics and on-screen text that repeats the narration. Printed sentences compete with the chart for the learner’s eyes, so the chart loses. A few key labels next to a number help; full sentences that repeat the voiceover do not.

Our first drafts had bullet points that duplicated the voiceover, because that is what training slides look like. We cut them. The slide now shows what the narration can’t: the statement, the chart, the number in context.

Rule 2: Point at the Thing (Signaling Principle)

This is the signaling principle. When a narrator explains a line on a cash flow statement, the learner should see that line highlighted at that moment. Attention is expensive, and a learner searching a spreadsheet for the number you mean is not listening to why it matters.

Credit training needs this more than most subjects, because the material is dense by nature. A spread has dozens of lines that look alike. Signaling is the difference between following an argument and hunting for it.

Rule 3: Delete Everything That Isn’t the Point (Coherence Principle)

This is the coherence principle. Decorative graphics, background music and the tangential fun fact all compete for the same limited working memory as the concept. Removing them feels like making the lesson plainer. It actually makes it easier to learn.

This one is the hardest to follow, because extras feel like polish. A stock photo of a handshake, a whoosh between slides, an aside that seemed charming in the script. Each one costs the learner a little of the attention they needed for the cash flow.

Where the Rigor Comes From

The rigor in our courses comes from Rex Beach’s credit method and the instructors who have taught it for 26 years. The delivery was rebuilt from research like Mayer’s. One supplies what to learn; the other shapes how it gets learned.

If you build training yourself and have found a principle that changed how you work, I would like to hear about it.

Frequently Asked Questions