Introduction: Most of the research on the design of multimedia instructional materials has addressed how to combine words and pictures to produce effective presentations whereas the development of single representations has received less attention. In this study we explored different ways of presenting single representations. Method: In Experiment…

In one experiment 97 undergraduate students learned about plate tectonics from a multimedia presentation involving narrated animations and support in one of four forms. Support in the prompting condition included hints inducing participants to self-explain critical information. The signaling condition included overviews recapping critical…