Chapter 2: Some Instructional Consequences of Logical Relations Between Multiple Sources of Information

In many curriculum areas, multiple sources of information may or may not be required during learning. Visual sources of information, such as diagrams, may be used in conjunction with spoken or written text, for example. Over the last few decades, many researchers have used cognitive load theory as a guide for investigating the instructional consequences of various permutations of different sources of information. One of the major but rarely considered findings is that the logical relationship between sources of information is critical to the instructional consequences and instructional recommendations. How we should organize a diagram and text, for example, depends on the logical relations between the diagram and text with different logical relations leading to very different instructional recommendations. The instructional consequences are vastly different depending on whether diagrammatic information associated with textual information is intelligible in isolation. These issues will be discussed with respect to several cognitive load theory effects along with the instructional implications that flow from those effects.