Multimedia is ubiquitous in 21st-century education. Cognitive load theory and the cognitive theory of multimedia learning both postulate that the quality of multimedia design heavily influences learning. We sought to identify how to best design multimedia and review how well those learning theories held up to meta-analyses. We conducted an overview of systematic reviews that tested the effects of multimedia design on learning or cognitive load. We found 29 reviews including 1,189 studies and 78,177 participants. We found 11 design principles that demonstrated significant, positive, meta-analytic effects on learning and five that significantly improved management of cognitive load. The largest benefits were for captioning second-language videos, temporal/spatial contiguity, and signaling. We also found robust evidence for modality, animation, coherence/removing seductive details, anthropomorphics, segmentation, personalization, pedagogical agents, and verbal redundancy effects. Good design was more important for more complex materials, and in system-paced environments (e.g., lectures) than self-paced ones (e.g., websites). Results supported many tenets of both theories. We highlight a range of evidence-based strategies that could be implemented by educators.

多媒体在 21 世纪的教育中无处不在。认知负荷理论和多媒体学习的认知理论都假设多媒体设计的质量对学习有很大影响。我们试图确定如何最好地设计多媒体，并审查这些学习理论对元分析的支持程度。我们对测试多媒体设计对学习或认知负荷的影响的系统评价进行了概述。我们找到了 29 篇综述，包括 1,189 项研究和 78,177 名参与者。我们发现 11 项设计原则对学习表现出显着、积极的元分析影响，而 5 项设计原则显着改善了认知负荷的管理。最大的好处是为第二语言视频添加字幕、时间/空间连续性和信号。我们还发现了模态、动画、连贯/去除诱人的细节、拟人化、分割、个性化、教学代理和言语冗余效果。良好的设计对于更复杂的材料和系统节奏的环境（例如讲座）比自定进度的环境（例如网站）更重要。结果支持这两种理论的许多原则。我们强调了一系列可以由教育工作者实施的循证策略。