Cognitive Theories and Instructional design

“Learning takes place in the brain, not at school” Spitzer

I agree totally with this statement has Instructional Designers we need to understand how individuals learn and how learning takes place in the brain. In order to design relevant learning material which will aide learning you have to become familiar with the learning theories. These theories will ultimately guide your decisions in designing your courses.

Stephen Sorden from Northern Arizona University pulled the Cognitive Theories together with instructional design into nine principles of good instructional design in his article entitled A Cognitive Approach to Instructional Design for Multimedia Learning. The principles are as follows Modality Principle, Contiguity Principle, Multimedia Principle, Personalization Principle, Coherence Principle, Redundancy Principle, Pre-training Principle, Signaling Principle and Pacing Principle

Modality Principle

The modality principle states that better transfer occurs when multimedia combines animation/pictures and narration as opposed to animation/pictures and on-screen text, i.e. students learn better in multimedia messages when words are presented as spoken language rather than printed text. This relates directly to the Theory of Dual Coding which suggests that we have two types of working memory, one verbal and one visual, and that we learn best when both channels are used together, rather than overloading one or the other.

Contiguity Principle

The contiguity principle states that better transfer occurs when corresponding narration and animation are presented simultaneously, both temporally and spatially. Temporal contiguity means that corresponding words and pictures should be presented at the same time, while spatial contiguity means that corresponding words and pictures should be presented near rather than far from each other on a page or screen. In other words, don’t place an important visual image on one page or frame, and then discuss it on a preceding or following page/frame without continuing to show the visual image.

Multimedia Principle

The multimedia principle states that better transfer occurs from animation/pictures and narration/words than from words alone. When words and pictures are both presented, learners have the chance to construct verbal and visual cognitive representations and integrate them.

Personalization Principle

The personalization principle states that better transfer occurs when narration is conducted in a conversational style (first or second person) rather than a formal style (third person).

Coherence Principle

The coherence principle states that better transfer occurs when extraneous material such as irrelevant video, animation, pictures, narration, and sounds are excluded. This is where instructional designers who employ gaming technology should be careful. He also likes to compare this effect to humorous commercials that we all love and talk about, yet can’t remember what the commercial was selling or who the sponsor was.

Redundancy Principle

The redundancy principle states that better transfer occurs when animation and narration are not combined with printed text. When pictures and words are both presented visually, it can overload visual working memory capacity.

Pre-training Principle

The pre-training principle states that better transfer occurs when training on components precedes a narrated animation. If the learner doesn’t understand the nature of each component, trying to construct a model of each component while trying to understand how they integrate with each other will quickly overload working memory. It is better to do pre-training on each component so that the learners already possesses schemas for them before presenting material that requires the learner to integrate each component into larger schemas. This connects to the concept of chunking and building schemas. Learners have to create low level schemas about a concept, before they can combine them into larger, more complicated schemas.

Signaling Principle

The signaling principle states that better transfer occurs when narrations are signaled. Signaling reduces cognitive load in auditory working memory by providing cues to the learner about how to organize the material. Signaling assists learners in the process of organizing sounds, which can result in deeper, more meaningful learning?

Pacing Principle

The pacing principle states that better transfer occurs when the pace of presentation is controlled by the learner, rather than by the program. Learners vary in the time needed to engage in the cognitive processes of selecting, organizing, and integrating incoming information, so they must have the ability to work at their own pace to slow or pause the presentation if necessary. If the pace of the presented material is too fast, then these cognitive processes may not be properly carried out and learning will suffer.

If the cognitive theories are your theories of choice then these nine principles should be of help to you in your next design project. Tell me what you think about them would they be of help you.

Refernce

Sorden, S.D. (2005). A Cognitive Approach to Instructional Design for Multimedia Learning. Informing Science Journal, 8, 263-279, Retrieved from http://elearnmap.ipgkti.edu.my/resource/dpli_r/index_htm_files/CognitiveApproachToID-ForMultimedia.pdf