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balance. The left hand and right hand sides of the
text button are balanced with respect to each other
and the red WoundCare title is also balanced with
the right bottom ‘Help’ and ‘Exit’ text/button
elements.
Another example, illustrated in figure 2 shows
that the title (Tutorials > Skin Anatomy and
Physiology) balances the navigation tools on the
bottom of the screen, and the tutorial learning text
balances the review questions.
Another example, shown in figure 3, illustrates
that the left-hand side index menu, the text in the
middle and the three images on the right hand side
integrate together to achieve closure. Note that the
text and images are also grouped to achieve another
closure effect. Here the text and graphics that were
previously on totally different screens were
integrated on a single screen to reduce a huge
extraneous cognitive effort of keeping substantial
quantities of new information in WM, while
searching for complementary graphics or vice versa.
In every screen we used the ‘Continuity’
technique to persuade the learner’s eye to perceive
correctly the whole visual screen. In the revised
screen design of the opening WoundCare screen in
figure 1, the learner’s eyes will follow the placement
of the menu text around the entry point of central
animation that shows the overview of the system, as
it is a logical pathway for a learner’s eyes to follow.
As shown in figure 4, all the menu text has also been
placed in logical order and this reinforces the effect.
In figure 3, the Continuity principle has also
been used, as in the right hand side of the screen the
learner’s eye will be lead from the first image to the
second and following on to the third image. On the
left-hand side of the screen, the index menu has been
designed in alphabetical order to assist the learner to
follow through the menu. The continuity
incorporated in these designs strongly suggests a
pattern for the learner to follow, like in the worked
examples practice mode in the CLT context. Thus
the learner’s search for salient information on these
screens is reduced freeing more WM resources to be
used in schema development.
The learner's focal point and attention in figure 3
is in the text area, but the focal point has changed to
an image in figure 6. Another example is shown on
figure 1, whereby the learner's attention will be
caught by a first look at the center of the animation
image. These are again guidance mechanisms
analogous to CLT principles to reduce haphazard
wanderings around a visual space, and thereby
releasing WM resources to attend to the salient
learning tasks.
Good Form been applied to the overall effect of
the redesigned screens, e.g. see figures 1, 2, 3, 5 and
6, gives a sense of Good Form. In CLT terms
existing LTM visual schemas are utilised to reduce
unproductive search and unnecessary construction of
new schemas.
The Law of Proximity can be seen in figure 3,
each element is identified and is clearly placed in its
place, e.g. navigation controls is placed on the
bottom of the screen, index menu is placed on the
left side of the screen. The space and round box
creates a line to identify different groups, leading the
student to directly link each group to its function. As
noted previously, this approach reduces the
detrimental split-attention effect by applying
contiguity, or close placement of relevant learning
elements (Mayer, 2001).
As well as using similarity to group similarly
perceived items together, a reader’s attention may be
drawn to particular features of interest by breaking
similarity, e.g. by borders, graphics/text boundaries,
differences in shading, colour differences,
highlights, underlining or dimmed key words. For
example, in figure 2, 3, 5 and 6, a standard color and
shape been used to group the navigation buttons
together helps learners to learn and easily recognize
the navigation buttons. Learners only need to use
the navigation button once in the first session, and
then they can go on to explore other sessions.
Another example can be observed in figure 3 where
the left index menu for the different InfoBase topics
is contained within a single banded area, and the text
and graphics on the screen are in different banded
areas. These approaches achieve similar effects of
grouping and distinguishing items as found in the
use of flashing to distinguish relevant elements in
the CLT context to reduce extraneous search..
Examples of simplicity of design are shown in
figure 1, 2, 3, 5 and figure 6, where all the items are
clearly displayed and available on the screen.
Although there may be many items on the same
screen for the learner to choose from, it still
represents a much simpler or elegant way to group
them together, which illustrates the principle of
simplicity. As noted previously integration of
learning elements in a single visual space reduces
the split-attention effect in CLT terms.
The challenge of the Law of Unity in design is
how to organize the related objects into the same
form, and how to let learners combine the individual
objects as a whole, when they are first perceived.
Within each section of the program, we used the
same type of transition to jump to the next page, in
order to distinguish different section segments. On
every screen we used the same text font, the left-
hand side was always used for a sub-menu, each
section title was always placed at the top right hand
corner, and the negative button was placed
consistently on the bottom of the screen. This
consistency implements the unity law, and reduces
THE MEETING OF GESTALT AND COGNITIVE LOAD THEORIES IN INSTRUCTIONAL SCREEN DESIGN
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