Roxana Moreno

Roxana Arleen Moreno (1960 to 2010) was an Argentine-American researcher who studied how people learn from multimedia and how instructional design affects cognitive load. Born in Detroit to Argentine immigrant parents, she first trained in law and economics, earning a bachelor's degree in economics in 1984 and a law degree in 1985 from the University of Buenos Aires, and taught in Argentina through the early 1990s before turning to psychology. She completed a master's degree at UC Santa Barbara in 1998 and a PhD there in 1999 under Richard E. Mayer, with a dissertation examining the role of pedagogic agents' image and language in multimedia learning. In 2000 she joined the University of New Mexico's educational psychology program, becoming an associate professor there before her death in 2010. Contemporary Educational Psychology ranked her among the twenty most productive educational psychologists worldwide for the period 1991 to 2002, and her research on reducing cognitive load and designing effective multimedia instruction earned her a 2003 Presidential Early Career Award and a 2010 American Educational Research Association fellowship.