week 9 & 10 class activity

Chang, Dooley and Tuovinen – Gestalt Theory in Visual Screen Design – A new look at an Old Subject

1.       Gestalt theory usually expressed as laws is one of the foundations for instructional screen designs and it is widely used to improve educational screen design consequently leading to effective learning. It has many variants (as many as 114 Helson 1933) of the laws which are closed related if not overlapping. The paper presents literature review of the eleven Gestalt laws applicable to screen design – visual form. These include: Law of Balance/Symmetry (visual object will appear incomplete if not balanced); Law of continuation (the instinct to follow direction derived from visual field); Law of closure (openness in objects or shapes perceived as incomplete visual pattern); Law of figure-ground (change of background/foreground in visual can lead to different perceived objects; Law of focal Point (focal point catches attention); Law of Isomorphic correspondence (images meanings varies as people read them different); Law of Good from; law of proximity; Law of similarity; Law of simplicity; Law of unit/harmony

2.       The above laws are applied to visual design of educational multimedia program. The results after applying the laws to the visual screen design we deemed effective with better usability compare to the first one. The usefulness of the Gestalt visual design principle for learning was highly ranked – therefore deem effective. It recognised as it add value to their learning with less enthusiasm will therefore need further research to leverage support. 

Week 9 & 10 class activity

 Learner Control, Cognitive Load and Instructional Animation – Hasler, Kesten & Sweller 2007

1.       Computer animation is increasingly be used in computer-based education across all subject domains and education levels. However, inappropriate design of animations can hinder learning. These can occur due to the high cognitive processing demands on human limited temporal working memory. To address this problem instructional animation based on appropriate designs as a result of cognitive load theory (CLT) research. The CLT research has demonstrated that if instructional activities are aligned to cognitive architecture are likely to results increased knowledge in the information store. Therefore CLT aims to decrease unnecessary cognitive load which is aligned to the limited learner’s working memory making effective transfer of information to long term memory store. As a result CLT minimizing the cognitive overload thus making mental resources readily available for the effective learning.

2.       The paper study address the gap due to the inconsistence results from multimedia learning pacing and segmentation. While pacing and segmentation is one of the instructional effects and design principles to overcome high unnecessary, ineffective cognitive load (extraneous) through controlled pace of the materials or division of instruction into meaningful segments. The results of the experiment shows learners learn better when given information (borrowing and reorganising) instead of exploring (randomness). This becomes critical to how information is then presented to them within the limits of working memory. Also the study highlights that the use of audio-visual animations didn’t add any significant difference to learning outcome therefore it deemed redundant for this experiments. Results provide conclusive support that learner-controlled pacing of animated presentation is advantageous to schema construction. The stop-play group in the study used random as genesis instead of borrowing and reorganising principles as they engaged in reflection of what they seen previously thus engaging in germane cognitive load for expository instructional material. They monitored what they learned as they used the paused the animation. The pausing is critical to schema construction and germane cognitive load lead to effective learning. Compared to continuous running of the animations may lead to learner paying less attention to what the learning. The results obtained in this paper offer insight on effective use of CLT in multimedia learning and support why it is appropriate to be applied. Learner control is to be integrated in educational animations to improve instructional efficiency.