Interactive Effects Between Cognitive Preferences and Instructional Strategies in Museum Learning Experiences

The wide opportunities offered by web-mediated environment have successfully convinced museums around the world to utilise the technology in enhancing their visitors' learning experiences. However, museum's visitor profiles are expected to involve diverse characteristics such as gender, background, and prior knowledge. These visitors' profile differences thus enforce museum curators to be mindful of how to present their online exhibits to ensure they afford more effective learning experiences. Yet, the rising interest in creating online museum environments presents fresh dilemmas for museum curators and their exhibit designers to understand the visitors' numerous differences. Meanwhile, examining cognitive differences in individuals is now becoming essential in understanding and explaining the complexities of effective human-computer interaction (HCI) whereby suggest that individual cognitive preferences may have an impact on how environmental variables affect learning. Accordingly, this research proposed that allowing for an individual's cognitive preferences may provide an appropriate solution to improve the design of the museum exhibits, particularly in the web-mediated environment. Applying the quasi-experimental design, the research investigated the interactive effects between the participants' cognitive preferences and the museum information representation formats within two different instructional strategies. The findings reveal that cognitive preferences do have an effect on the participants' performance in their museum learning outcome. Accordingly, an interaction effect was noted between the participants' cognitive preferences and the instructional strategies in their museum learning performances. The findings from this research help to understand how learners' mental models may work to enhance their information processing through the web-mediated instruction they receive thus provide the empirical evidence that it is important to understand how specific multimedia format can better present the online museum exhibits.