Courseware designers aim to innovate information communications technology (ICT) tools to increase learning experiences, spending many hours developing eLearning programmes. This effort gives rise to a dynamic technological pedagogical environment. However, it is difficult to recognise whether these online programmes reflect an instructional design (ID)-model or whether they can be substantiated through sound ID principles. This study presents a systematic courseware design-validation procedure; giving preliminary empirical results from learners' cognitive performance outcomes. A series of 2x3 factorial quasi-experiments were conducted to validate the performance instrumentation and to 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. Participants' cognitive preferences were identified using the cognitive style analysis (CSA) test. Initial observations suggest that testing instruments were able to make reliable probabilistic inferences of the cognitive performance outcomes. [For full proceedings, see ED571459.]