This research investigated the effects of 3 instructional design formats on learning introductory accounting. In accordance with cognitive load theory, it was predicted that students who would learn with a guided self-managed instructional design format would outperform students who would learn with a conventional split-attention format or an integrated format on a recall test and a transfer test. In the guided self-management condition students were instructed to reorganize text and diagrams to reduce the need to search the solution steps within the text and match them with corresponding parts of the diagram, thereby freeing cognitive resources for learning. The results of an experiment conducted with 123 undergraduate university students confirmed the hypothesis by consistently demonstrating that students in the guided self-managed condition outperformed students in the integrated and split-attention conditions on the recall and transfer tests.