THE EFFECT OF COGNITIVE LOAD ASSOCIATED WITH INSTRUCTIONAL FORMATS AND TYPES OF PRESENTATION ON SECOND LANGUAGE READING COMPREHENSION PERFORMANCE

ABSTRACT

The effectiveness of instructional designs has been examined in several recent educational studies. Instructional design, both traditional and technology-based, can sometimes overload a learner’s cognitive effort and thus negatively influence learning performance. The same learning material can induce different amounts of memory load as a result of differences in the instructional design used for its presentation. The present study aims to investigate the cognitive load effects of instructional formats (split-attention and integrated formats) and text presentation types (paper-based and online) on students’ second language reading comprehension performance. In   a split-attention format, comprehension questions were placed at the end of the reading text, while in an integrated format, comprehension questions were physically integrated into relevant paragraphs of the reading text. The quantitative data was collected through reading comprehension tests from forty pre-service teachers in an English Language Teaching department. The result of this post-test-only experimental design study showed that there was no statistically significant difference across the four groups, Online Reading-Split Attention Format; Online Reading-Integrated Format; Paper-based Reading Split Attention Format; and Paper-based Reading Integrated Format,  in terms of students’ second language reading comprehension (L2) reading comprehension scores. On the other hand, the result showed that there was a statistically significant difference in L2 comprehension between participants who read online text and those who read paper-based text.