Poor multimedia comprehenders suffer from a decreased ability in comprehending complex textual and pictorial materials (Maki & Maki, 2002). This deficit will lead to an overloaded working memory and consequently decreased performance (Carretti, Borella, Cornoldi, & De Beni, 2009). The purpose of this research study was to examine the effects of modality and multimedia comprehension on the performance of students with varied multimedia comprehension abilities when exposed to high complexity, self-paced multimedia instructional materials. A 2 x 2 generalized randomized block design with two levels of multimedia comprehension and two levels of modality was employed. The dependent variables were retention and transfer. A sample of 115 students participated in the study. The ANOVA results for the modality factor showed that modality had little or no effect on students' performance in the retention test. However, it had some effect on students' performance in the transfer test. The ANOVA for multimedia comprehension showed that multimedia comprehension significantly affected students' retention and transfer performance; average and above student significantly outperformed below average student. Finally, the ANOVA for the interaction effect demonstrated a significant interaction effect in the transfer measure and not the retention measure. A reverse modality effect was found in the average and above groups. The transfer performance of the average and above group in the unimodal condition was higher than the transfer performance of the average and above group in the bimodal condition. (Contains 3 tables and 7 figures.)