How Does Formatting Support Learning?
Effective Learning Through Intentional Formatting
Online students will learn easily when we design our pages to support learning. Formatting pages well supports all learners. Let's take a quick look at why formatting matters.
Learning is studied by everyone from cognitive scientists to marketing teams. While their goals and interests may vary widely, one commonality is the desire to make learning easier.
These groups have developed their own approaches to learning, but they agree that two strategies have big benefits: developing schemas and grouping.
Schemas
Schemas allow learners to see patterns and organize categories of information. A schema is a representation of a plan or theory in the form of an outline or model. Schemas can be really powerful, as they allow us to understand new material by connecting it to old material that we already understand.
You may be scratching your head and wondering what an advanced learning theory has to do with creating a beautiful page. The answer is simple. To design the best pages, you must first ensure that you've thoughtfully divided the material in your learning unit into smaller "chunks" that make sense based on some sort of schema.
Before you start designing your page, evaluate the whole unit, and check to make sure the content is thoughtfully divided into pages. If you'd like to know more about the role of schema in learning, here's a great overview of learning theory from Crash Course Psychology. View the whole video (7 minutes), or jump directly to the information on schemas (at the 2:40 mark).
The Growth of Knowledge: Crash Course Psychology #18
Links to an external site.
Grouping
Our ability to understand underlying schema and to connect meaningfully to existing schema is enhanced when information is thoughtfully grouped into chunks. Your units should be broken into chunks, with each chunk appearing on a separate page in the module, and the information on each page should be grouped into smaller chunks.