Part 1: Signalling Principle
This document is the first part of a guide to Signalling with Text and Media Areas.
Related documentation is available for:
What will the student do now?
Whenever students access ARK, they are doing so with the intent to advance their learning. Our job as educators is to ensure that students can find the learning resources and information they need as they progress in their learning.
That’s why asking what the student is going to do on each visit is so important.
What students need to find when they access the ARK unit is based on context:
- Students get access to units a week before the start of the semester. When a student logs in on Monday, 19 February – what are they looking for?
- Students use ARK to access resources and activities during the teaching period. In a face-to-face weekly delivery, what are they looking for before or after a class? In an asynchronous delivery, is it clear what a student should be reading or participating in at the time they login?
- Finally, students use ARK to prepare for, and submit assessments. Can they find the information they need to understand the task requirements, meet those requirements, and submit the task?
Signalling Princple
One of the methods of reducing cognitive load identified by educational psychologist, Richard Mayer and colleagues is the Signalling principle. A basic implementation of this principle is to mark on a or highlight in text the information a learner needs to take note of.
Signalling (or cueing)
“multimedia learning materials become more effective when cues are added that guide learners’ attention to the relevant elements of the material or highlight the organisation of the material” 1
Applying Signalling in ARK Design
In setting up ARK units, we want to think about how we use signalling to help students:
- Locate relevant information and resources, and
- Choose which information or activity to access.
Locate relevant information
If our answer to “what will the student do now?” is “ensure they are ready to join a Zoom class”, then, is it easy to locate the Zoom links?
Effective use of ARK layout can make this easier.
Zoom Links Tip
Please create your zoom links and place them on ARK well before class. Try to have them up when students gain access to the unit, which is a week before the scheduled start date. This will make life so much easier for both the students and the various support teams.Choose which information to access
We also want to help students choose which information to access.
Very few, if any, students have the luxury of taking a unit of study with no competing interests on their time. We can’t assume a utopia where students have the time and motivation to read 300 pages every week. Further, if we want to ensure as many students as possible attain the learning outcomes, we need to help students who make time poor decisions to prioritise the time they do put towards learning.
Even the best students have crises that affect their ability to prioritise study.
Takeaway recommendations
Help students make good choices by signalling:
- The order in which tasks should be completed,
- The difference between required tasks and optional tasks, and
- An indicative time allocation for completing each task.
To test whether you have done this effectively, imagine a student who knows they have a set amount of time until they need to pick up the kids from school. If they were to open ARK and say, “I have 90 minutes to study”, would they be able to easily identify what the best use of their 90 minutes could be?
In Part 2: Building an ARK Section or Topic, we will begin applying Signalling Principle to building a section or topic in an ARK unit.
Van Gog, T. (2014). The Signaling (or Cueing) Principle in Multimedia Learning. In R. Mayer (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology, pp. 263-278). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139547369.014 ↩︎