فصلنامه روانشناسی شناختی

One great ability of the brain is memory. Poor visual-auditory memory leads to dyslexia, dyscalculia and hyperactivity. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a test to determine the ability and accurate performance of memory. With this in mind, a test has been prepared using theoretical literature. This researcher-made memory test consists of four parts (numerical-verbal memory, visual memory, working memory and auditory-sentence memory) and its validity has been confirmed by professors of cognitive psychology and counselling in addition to using the random cluster sampling method on a sample of 308 elementary school students. The questions were analysed by relevant statistical methods and their validity, reliability and norm scores were determined. To evaluate the reliability of the test, three methods were used. The reliability coefficient was 0.83 using the internal consistency method and the Pearson correlation coefficient was determined to be r = 0.79 between the two halves of the questionnaire, which indicated that there was a high correlation between the two halves of the questionnaire. To determine the validity of the structure and components of the questionnaire, the principal component analysis method was used by rotation in the normalised Varimax method and to evaluate differential validity, an independent t-test was used. The results showed that there was a significant difference between the mean scores of male and female students. (P < 0.001 and t (204) = 2.76). Based on the obtained reliability and validity, the audiovisual memory test is a tool that could be used by disorder and counselling centres. Moreover, it could be used as a tool for early assessment and diagnosis in the case of preschool students.

Cognitive Load Theory is one of the most powerful research frameworks in educational research. The main concern within this framework is to develop a proper instrument to measure cognitive load. Hence, the goal of this research was to investigate the reliability and validity of the Cognitive Load Questionnaire designed by Kelpsch, Schmitz and Seufert (2017). This questionnaire was administered to 206 seventh- and eighth-grade female students, in which they rated the amount of intrinsic, germane, and extraneous load of various learning tasks on a 7-point Likert scale. The reliability and validity of the questionnaire were examined and confirmed through Cronbach's alpha coefficient and t-test in which the quality of individuals' answers in different tasks were compared together. In addition, confirmatory factor analysis was performed using LISREL 8.80, to investigate factor structure of the questionnaire. The results showed that the questionnaire has desirable reliability and validity to measure different types of cognitive load. The results of confirmatory factor analysis also revealed a three-factor structural model whose fit indices suggested a desirable fit with the data, thus corroborating the three-factor structure of the cognitive load questionnaire. Therefore, this questionnaire can be a proper measure to assess different types of cognitive load in seventh and eighth grade students.