This chapter outlines two basic ways to measure wisdom. Self-report measures are quick and easy to administer. Their main disadvantage is that they assess people’s own views of their own wisdom, which may or may not be an accurate representation of their actual wisdom. In fact, highly wise individuals may view themselves as less wise than highly self-confident but not-quite-as-wise individuals! Self-report measures are more useful for assessing attitudes or feelings than for assessing competencies and abilities. Open-ended, problem-based measures of wisdom do not require people to judge themselves. They directly show how wisely participants think about difficult problems. Obviously, the effort and time required to administer, transcribe, and code open-ended wisdom measures is much higher than for self-report measures. Also, when we present people with fictitious problems of fictitious people, emotional involvement will be low and their responses will represent theoretical wisdom that they might not be able to access in a stressful situation. If we interview them about problems from their own life, however, different people may end up talking about very different problems. Currently, researchers are working on measures that involve participants emotionally but remain somewhat standardized with respect to content.

This chapter describes diverse research methods to study multimedia learning. In light of the wide range of methods to study learning with multimedia and to stay in line with the focus of this Handbook, I target experimental research where a variation of multimedia design is tested against (at least) a control design. Thus, I omit case studies, technical developments, design-based research, etc. Moreover, I only take into consideration research in which the main dependent measure was some sort of learning outcome, such as performance, retention, or transfer. In addition, I look into variables mediating the way to this learning outcome. In this way I come to the following structuring of measures: tests that a priori capture characteristics of learners, measures that online trace the process of learning, self-reports of how learners experienced this learning, and learning outcome measures. For each type of measure, I provide a description and concrete examples of their use in multimedia research. Lastly, I explore thus far, less-frequently used methods in multimedia research, that have, however, the potential to shed new light on multimedia learning.