Component Display Theory

Component display theory is an instructional design theory developed by the American educational psychologist M. David Merrill, published in 1983 as a chapter in Charles Reigeluth's edited volume Instructional-Design Theories and Models. The theory classifies instructional content along two independent dimensions: a content dimension distinguishing facts, concepts, procedures and principles, and a performance dimension distinguishing whether a learner is expected to remember, use or find that content. Crossing these two dimensions produces a matrix of content-by-performance combinations, and Merrill prescribed, for each cell of that matrix, an appropriate set of primary presentation forms, such as a rule, an example or a practice item, along with secondary presentation forms, such as a prerequisite, a mnemonic or feedback, intended to help a learner reach the matching objective. The theory was among the first instructional design frameworks to argue that different combinations of content type and desired performance call for genuinely different instructional treatments rather than a single generic teaching method, and it directly shaped Merrill's later, more broadly framed First Principles of Instruction.