I see, therefore I learn: pedagogic innovation in the cognitive-visual era

This article is concerned with the widely-established but pedagogically-neglected cognitive truism that anyone who sees, learns visually. Multimedia Learning (MML) scholarship, derived from the Cognitive Sciences, identifies a common cognitive architecture known as ‘dual processing’ shared by all sighted people. The literature predicts that people learn better from images and text than text alone, or predominantly. Subsequent peer-reviewed research establishes the veracity of this claim in a variety of institutions and disciplines. This requires a new conversation in HE about a generalizable multimedia pedagogy, a structure though which to establish principles and practice, and a mechanism to ascertain their effectiveness. It is all the more pertinent, since we may readily capitalize on the most visual era of human history to enable a transformed pedagogy. Yet we have failed largely to take proper stock of how this ‘pictorial turn’ in human evolution might support the generations we teach, for whom it is already a norm. The article discusses MML scholarship and predictions and how this can interject a potentially universal innovation into HE teaching and learning. It then discusses principles by which to reify such an innovation. Finally, it advances an innovative and shareable digital research tool to test such reification and discusses initial longitudinal data from a Randomized Control Trial. It concludes by identifying a further research agenda to compensate for present shortcomings in MML theory and data development.