Sample 2: Infographic
Rationale
College instructors often write guidelines for students on how to complete and submit an assignment. However, students keep flooding instructors with questions, because they are overwhelmed by the guidelines. For that reason, I wanted to create an infographic that showed instructors how to reduce extraneous cognitive load.
Problem:
When changes are required based on students’ negative outcome or behavior toward a topic presentation or an assignment, instruction should be able to determine which solutions will improve students’ learning experience.
Choice:
According to this example, the segmentation effect and the signaling effect were the solutions chosen to solve the problem.
Thinking:
The big question in this infographic is “How to reduce cognitive load?”
Design principles:
The infographic not only contains information about segmentation effect and signaling effect, but it also presents the problem and solution in a student-centered manner. The alignment used is in Y shape and information is presented in contrast (problem and solution side-by-side, in two columns). The illustration of a student is placed to split the two big categories (problem x solution). Information is also chunked using horizontal lines and title and subtitles stand out with different font, color and size.
Additional design principles used include:
contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity; typography rules; segmentation effect; and signaling effect.
Working question:
Which of the nine methods of cognitive overload reduction should we choose according to a particular instructional situation?
Infographic
Reflection
Working with infographics is always a lot of fun. Using the graphic art typically found in infographics, I was able to show and tell methods to reduce cognitive overload.
What I noticed is that there is not a lot out there to differentiate an instructional infographic from a poster, from a marketing report, etc. I would say that an instructional infographic should guide the user/learner through their inquiry (question) by showing strategies, steps, or schemas.
References
Mayer, R. E., & Moreno, R. (2003). Nine ways to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning. Educational psychologist, 38(1), 43-52. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326985EP3801_6