Review by: Dreier, Matthias (2004-10-27)

Min and his team at the University of Twente have studied interfaces for parallel instruction for over a decade. In problem-solving tasks the information to solve a problem is usually presented in several documents. This may cause attention split effects and cognitive overload; aspects that have also been addressed by the cognitive load theory or Richard E. Mayer’s theory of multimedia learning.

The authors argue that traditional courseware for eLearning is often designed in an almost linear way, either a series of screen pages or very long scrollable hypertext pages. Learners have to use overlapping windows to deal with more than one document at a time.

The authors led an experiment where they presented similar tasks in five different designs to 18 participants. The courseware consisted of a problem page and an instruction page. The designs included a two-frame version, two designs of overlapping windows, a very long page, and a control design where the instructions and the problem description were displayed on two different screens at a distance of two meters. The participants performed best with the two-frame design, though not significantly better than with the other versions. The interviews after the test showed that they also liked the two-frame design best.

The results of the experiment are somewhat surprising. Apparently the participants did not like the freedom to move and resize the windows. In the fixed, two-frame version with two individually scrollable columns they performed best. The fact that the participants disliked the very long page most but performed second-best with that version is surprising, too; another indication that user satisfaction and user performance do not always correlate. It is, perhaps, a little bit too ambitious to derive a theory of parallelism from such experiments. Nevertheless, the design principles presented in the article can be applied to other multimedia courseware as well.