A Quantitative Model for Unifying Human Factors with Cognitive Load Theory

Abstract

Education remains a severely unpolished domain for the application of human factors principles; although human factors methods and theories thrive in their application within both the learning and training domains. Continued efforts are needed to increase educational outcomes from the human-system interaction perspective. This paper shall continue to investigate how to apply constructs and theory from within the related human factors, human-computer interaction, and usability fields to the domain of instructional design. This paper intends to place human factors, human-computer interaction, and usability measurement methods among those used to evaluate cognitive load for the benefit of instructional design, following a new quantitative model for cognitive load. This effort shall assist in increasing collaboration between the fields of human factors and education, and make a significant contribution to cognitive load theory measurement methods.