A Substack post that suddenly seemed to appear everywhere in my feed led me to an interesting systematic review recently published in Review of Education. The authors did something that, surprisingly, had never been done before. They searched for experimental evidence supporting the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies, a framework that has become highly influential in some areas of literacy education, first proposed by the New London Group in 1996. They screened more than 20,000 publications. The result? An “empty review”. They could not find a single study that met the criteria of a (quasi-)experimental classroom intervention with a comparison group testing the pedagogy’s effects on learning outcomes.

The first messages I read left me briefly confused. Several of them used the term multimodal learning, leaving me wondering: does this mean there is no evidence for multimodal learning? Have I been citing the wrong research all these years? The source of the confusion is actually quite simple. In education, people use the term multimodal in two very different ways…

The first meaning will be familiar to many educators through Richard Mayer’s Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning, a theory I have referred to many times myself. In this context, people often use multimodal to refer to presenting information through different modes, such as words and pictures. Researchers have tested questions such as when illustrations help, when spoken text outperforms written text, and when additional information becomes distracting in hundreds of controlled experiments. As a result, Mayer’s multimedia principles are among the most thoroughly researched findings in instructional psychology.

The second meaning comes from the multiliteracies movement developed by the New London Group. I have to admit that I was much less familiar with this literature myself. Nobody can know everything. Here, multimodality is not primarily about how the brain processes information. Instead, it refers to the many different ways people make meaning through language, images, sound, movement, space and digital media. It is a much broader pedagogical framework, emphasising identity, culture, participation, critical thinking and social justice.

Both approaches use the same word, but they are based on fundamentally different ideas. That is why statements such as “research shows that multimodal learning works” can easily become misleading. The obvious follow-up question should be: which multimodal learning are we talking about?

For Mayer’s theory, there is indeed a substantial experimental evidence base. For the broader pedagogy of multiliteracies, however, this new review concludes that such experimental evidence is currently lacking. That is not proof that the pedagogy does not work, despite what some commentators have already suggested. It simply means that the broad claims about improved learning outcomes are not yet supported by the type of evidence that we increasingly expect for educational interventions. So next time you hear or use the term multimodal, ask one simple question: which multimodal?