“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
