Crescitelli - Week 4 Contiguity Issues

Explaining Contiguity Principles

In Instructional Message Design, we studied the concepts of CARP, PAT, ACE, and ADDIE. These processes all deal with how instruction is designed. A presentation of those concepts can be found here:

http://prezi.com/dtnaps0vo9ie/creating-graphics-for-learning-and-performance/

The concept of contiguity simplifies many of those concepts. Contiguity is the coordination of spoken word and graphics to maximize instructional input. Contiguity is the instructors’ attempts to incorporate words and media to “guide the learner’s cognitive processing during learning (p.65)”.

This design must be done with care to allow the learner to make connections between the text and the media. Processing for each happens separately in the brain, but with proper instructional design and technique, learners make connections and integrate the modalities to create meaning. The key for learner success is to prevent cognitive overload by following the design principle that “less is more.”

Avoid decorative graphics that do not enhance the instructional message, instead focusing on graphics that are organizational, transformational or interpretive in nature. These encourage higher level thinking skills in your learners and offer engagement not present in decorative graphics (p. 58-59). Animated graphics do not enhance instruction; in fact, it has been shown that static graphics allow the learner time to process and alleviates extra cognitive load.

It’s about coordination of the message design, and maximizing learner memory.