Fundamentally Cognitive Load Theory says “In order to increase learning, reduce extraneous load and optimise intrinsic load.”
The author splits the book into 3 sections; firstly giving the reader some context around the brain and cognitive load, then he looks at ways of optimising intrinsic load before finishing the book identifying ways to reduce extraneous load.
ABCDE of Cognitive Load Theory
A - Architecture of the brain. Working memory is the bottleneck to long term memory. New information takes up more working capacity than familiar information. Think about year 1 students writing individual letters up to year 11 students writing full essays. We can reduce working memory load by chunking and automating information.
B - Biologically secondary knowledge, which is the focus of schooling and is relevant more recently in evolutionary terms, must be taught. Biologically primary knowledge we have evolved to acquire e.g. listen and speak, recognise faces etc, do not need instruction on.
C - Categorising. Intrinsic cognitive load is what we want the working memory to be thinking about, extraneous load comes from the manner and structure of instruction to students, anything that draws working memory away from the core information to be learned, teachers need to reduce it. Combined, extraneous and intrinsic load cannot exceed working memory capacity. To increase learning, reduce extraneous load and allocate the thinking space to intrinsic load.
D - Domain knowledge. Experts possess a greater amount of relevant domain specific knowledge. You need to increase your knowledge in the specific domain you want to use it. Skills such as creativity and problem solving are not transferable to other areas, they are specific to the domain.
E - Element interactivity. Difficulty of learning is dependent on the number of interacting elements and prior knowledge. Intrinsic load is optimised through appropriate curriculum sequencing, extraneous load is minimised by good instructional design
Optimising intrinsic load
Optimising intrinsic load is how we can improve the teachers instruction so that students are able to learn and retain knowledge more easily.
1) Pre teaching
Delivering a portion of content before the main lesson and reinforcing it through revision. Could be used with keywords, timelines, characters etc
2) Segmentation
Breaking it up into bite-sized chunks. Segmented skills often look very different from the final performance.
3) Sequencing and combination
How we break up and sequence the knowledge we want students to learn, generally we could look at a part-whole approach or a whole-part approach.
Part-whole is breaking up the content and teaching parts of it first and then incorporating them together to form the whole. For example we could use:
- Forward and backward chaining - teaching individual parts in order from the start or from the end, each part separately.
- Snowballing - building on the parts before, so new content and old at same time, similar to chaining. Allows for multiple exposure to concept and spacing out practice.
Whole-part is giving an overview first then breaking it to individual parts through simplifying the whole task or manipulating the emphasis to focus on a few key points to ensure success.
Reducing Extraneous Load
Presentation of information - Teacher instruction
1) Redundancy - eliminate unnecessary information and do not repeat necessary info
Saying what is written down, verbal and written is vying for working memory and therefore interfering with each other.
2) Split attention - information that must be combined, should be placed together in space and time. (think angles questions in exams)
3) Transient Information - when information disappears and students must hold it in working memory this causes extraneous cognitive load. E.g. keeping examples on the board for students to see
4) Modality - present info both auditory and visual to eliminate split attention and expand working memory capacity. This doesn't mean you speak the written words, that is still redundant. Verbal and visual must be needed to make sense of the info, if you don't need one of them to understand the concept then the other is redundant.
Structuring the practice - Student practice
Worked examples - the phase between teacher instruction and independent tasks, we part of teaching. Based from Swellers work on worked examples. Expertise reversal effect - learners need different support depending on their levels of expertise. Worked examples are better for novices whereas problem solving is better for experts.
If using worked examples, they must be structured effectively and we must persist with them. Think about using them almost too long so that students are completely familiar with the task.
A. Alternation strategy - example problem pairs so example then similar problem lots of times. Small steps in variation between examples.
B. Fading - lines of working progressively omitted for students to complete until they are answering the whole question by themselves. Forwards and backwards fading.
C. Self explanation - explain an example to themselves in terms of its underlying principle. Self explanation prompts, why has the teacher done this? Explain. Potentially explain incorrect examples next to correct workings for more able students.
- process prompts rather than example specific prompts.
- connection prompts - to link to previously learned things
- anticipation prompts - what will happen next, what would happen if
Teach the prompts explicitly and try to internalise these for students.
D. The goal free effect - removing the goal removes a large number of elements freeing up working memory to focus on learning. Shift the emphasis from getting an answer to cause and effect to gain a deeper understanding to be able to solve new problems in the future. Can't just remove the goal and it works, there needs to be restricted actions, rapid feedback and reliable results. Too much focus on goals can lead to successfully completing a task but learning very little from it.