Investigating the effectiveness of courseware design: A rasch-measurement approach

Higher education institutions around the world are taking opportunities presented by the eLearning community to design instructional environments that accommodate various learners' educational needs. It appears that 'technology enhanced instruction' having the potential to facilitate life-long knowledge acquisition, has been taken for granted. Yet considerable time and effort has been expended by courseware designers to innovate information communications technology (ICT) tools to enhance the technology-enabled learning experiences. This study presents a systematic courseware design-validation procedure; giving preliminarily empirical results from learners' cognitive performance outcomes. A series of 2x3 factorial quasi-experiments were conducted to validate the performance instrumentations and substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed courseware-design model. A total of 167-participants, from four higher education institutions took part in this research project. The cognitive style analyses (CSA) test was used to identify learners' cognitive preference. Initial observations suggest that testing instruments were able to make reliable probabilistic inferences of the cognitive performance outcomes