THE MEETING OF GESTALT AND COGNITIVE LOAD THEORIES IN INSTRUCTIONAL SCREEN DESIGN

Dempsey Chang, Juhani E. Tuovinen

2004

Abstract

Without doubt Gestalt Theory has formed an important basis for many aspects of educational visual screen design. Despite the familiarity many computer screen designers claim with it, Gestalt Theory is not a single small set of visual principles uniformly applied to by all designers. In fact, it appears that instructional visual design literature often deals with only a small set of Gestalt laws. Recently Gestalt literature was consulted to distil the most relevant Gestalt laws for educational visual screen design, resulting in eleven laws being identified. In this paper these laws are discussed in terms of the Cognitive Load Theory, (CLT), which has been used with considerable success to improve instructional design. The usefulness of the combined perspectives drawn from the Gestalt Theory and CLT for educational visual screen design were applied to the redesign of an instructional multimedia application, WoundCare, designed to teach nursing students wound management. The evaluation results were encouraging. Both the new design and the value of applying the eleven Gestalt laws and CLT principles to improve learning were strongly supported. However, many aspects of applying this combination of theories to educational interface design remain unclear and this forms a useful direction for future research.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Chang D. and E. Tuovinen J. (2004). THE MEETING OF GESTALT AND COGNITIVE LOAD THEORIES IN INSTRUCTIONAL SCREEN DESIGN . In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 5: ICEIS, ISBN 972-8865-00-7, pages 53-62. DOI: 10.5220/0002621700530062

in Bibtex Style

@conference{iceis04,
author={Dempsey Chang and Juhani E. Tuovinen},
title={THE MEETING OF GESTALT AND COGNITIVE LOAD THEORIES IN INSTRUCTIONAL SCREEN DESIGN},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 5: ICEIS,},
year={2004},
pages={53-62},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0002621700530062},
isbn={972-8865-00-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 5: ICEIS,
TI - THE MEETING OF GESTALT AND COGNITIVE LOAD THEORIES IN INSTRUCTIONAL SCREEN DESIGN
SN - 972-8865-00-7
AU - Chang D.
AU - E. Tuovinen J.
PY - 2004
SP - 53
EP - 62
DO - 10.5220/0002621700530062