There is little doubt in my mind that cognitive load and its impact on student learning in the classroom is one of the most important considerations we must contend with as teachers.
Cognitive load theory uses knowledge of the human brain to design teaching strategies that will maximise learning. Cognitive load is a critical consideration when determining a sequence of learning employing digital tools. Understanding how students best learn and why digital tool design can have an impact is a considerable advantage for every teacher.
Digital resources designed for our classrooms and that are adaptive enough to support our students with a range cognitive, social and emotional needs can be a joy to work with. Poorly designed classroom tools can be an imposition at best and impede learning or worse – denigrate the benefit of digital tools for learning more broadly.
The environment in which we work matters and the digital tools we use matter.
One of the key influences in the use of digital tools is their impact on our capacity to focus on the task at hand. Well-designed digital tools can do some of the work of memory for us, retaining our attention, ensuring our focus on the problem is balanced and considered. Well-considered digital tools can allow us to reach more deeply and with a clearer sense of their purpose within a learning sequence. Poorly designed digital tools, those overburdened by distraction and poor design can provide notable imposition on a student’s capacity to engage with the task at hand.
New information takes up far more space in our working memory (Sweller, 2011), and so when working with new knowledge and new ideas, it’s critical that we have a working environment that does not add further burden upon our working memory.
The impact of extraneous information – of unrelated information that’s held in working memory – can have a dramatic influence over whether we are in a position to capably attend to a problem. Poorly designed tools, digital tools with complex navigation or that were designed to direct us towards outcomes other than the ones we’re seeking, only add to existing cognitive burden as we attempt to understand and resolve a problem.
The limits of working memory
There’s only so much we can hold in our working memory at any one time. As Lovell observes on Sweller’s work, “For any learning to take place, a number of elements of new information must be considered and related in working memory, and then incorporated into long-term memory.”
Working memory is limited both in duration and capacity when it is having to contend with new or ‘novel’ information. “The more elements of new information that a student is required to think about – to process in their working memory – during a learning task, and the more complex the relations between these elements – the number of interactions – the more challenging the learning task will be” (Lovell, 2020).
We can only hold and process a limited amount of novel information in our working memory at any one time. With a task set before students in the classroom, the more unnecessary information they have to contend with, the less available working memory remains to actually wrestle with the problem.
Our goal is to help students in their development of long-term memories that guide their thinking and understanding – memories that are well structured and durable (Mccrea, 2017).
Sweller contends that once information has been processed in working memory and stored as new knowledge in our long-term memory, it is then available to govern further action. It is this transference that is so fundamental to our work as teachers. There are no known limits when dealing with information drawn from long-term memory. The transformational effect of education is a consequence of our understanding of this process. With new knowledge in long-term memory, we can accomplish things we might not otherwise dream of achieving.
Extraneous load
This is the information that is unrelated to the problem at hand. Extraneous load is the term used to describe the distractions that impede our working memory from processing new information. This is the stuff that gets in the way of shifting new information into long-term memory. The more we can reduce extraneous load, the greater the amount of working memory available to us to solve the problem.
It could be a physical distraction in the classroom that is drawing student attention away, unrelated information that you've presented with along with the key information for the task. It might also be the digital tools you're using to work through the problem. Digital tools that contain advertising features may cause a distraction or elements that are unnecessary to resolve the work students are undertaking.
Intrinsic load
This is the term used to describe the information required to resolve a problem. It is essentially the cognitive resources you need to shift new knowledge from your working memory to long-term memory. We want the working memory resources to be wholly focused on the problem we’re trying to understand, with only the essential information that relates to the task taking up room in our working memory.
Our intrinsic load is influenced by how well it leverages our existing knowledge, how much new knowledge is required, and the number and degree of complexity in the interactions of those intrinsic elements required to solve the problem.
Well-designed sequences of learning seek to minimise the extraneous load elements and optimise intrinsic load. As Lovell observes, “Extraneous interacting elements are minimised through good instructional design” (Lovell, 2020). Use the right tools with a minimal amount of distraction and you set the scene for a working environment optimal to the right conditions needed. Simple digital tools allow us to further reduce the extraneous load and increase the likelihood of an optimal environment for learning.
Duration
The length of time students spend with a problem is critical to their capacity to understand and apply new knowledge and skills. When employing cumbersome or poorly designed digital tools, we can encounter delays in both the establishment of the learning task, throughout the activity and in concluding and saving work.
At each of these three stages, delays impact heavily on the capacity of the student to respond to a problem and reflect on their efforts. A delay strains our intrinsic load and can frustrate our transition to the next scaffolded task. The longer we wait, the longer the delay from one stage of learning to the next, the harder it is to retain the information understood from the previous problem in our working memory.
To put it another way, let’s say you’ve used a worked example with students to show them what success looks like for a particular problem. Great – this is a powerful and essential approach that has a high effect rating (Hattie, 2009) and a high rate of success in cognitive load theory (Sweller, 2011).
We know from Sweller’s work that the longer you delay between a short and targeted discussion of an approach employed by an expert to the student’s own opportunity to attempt to replicate the approach, the less likely the student will be to find success. This is simply because of the delay between example and execution, between being given the essential information that relates to a successful approach and putting it into practice.
Introduce further delays in this process through the employment of poorly designed digital tools and your likelihood of success for students is further diminished.
Some of these delays could be, but are not limited to:
Login problems and waiting for the class to be ready at the same time or delaying the application of instruction just given by the teacher and the students being ready and prepared to begin the work.
Tool complexity is when digital tools simply offer many more features than are needed for the task at hand. I’ve often seen this to be the case with discussion tools, such as chat rooms or forum spaces. Complexity in both design and a myriad of features that simply aren’t necessary to host the conversation results in an unnecessary range of choices being pressed upon students that distract them from the core work being undertaken.
Advertising and elements designed to distract are a consideration here, and when promotional features are working hard to draw the attention of the learner, is it any wonder that their capacity to focus on the task is diminished? This isn’t only limited to advertising for other services external to the tool, but internal promotion of features or paid services that have just as significant an impact upon the intrinsic load available to the student to complete the work. This can also take the form of elements included on a page to draw attention, but that are unrelated to the task at hand. A picture intended to get your attention for example, but that has no purposeful link to the learning activity being presented can do more harm than good. Students might spend precious moments assessing the relationship between the image and the task, clarifying how or why it is related to the problem they are faced with.
Broad design concerns can often cause a delay or a distraction for students attempting to engage with a task where the activity demands a fraction of the features available or offers options useful only to an expert practitioner but that are unnecessary for the classroom. This isn’t to say that there isn’t a place for these types of complex tools, but when those additional features are not required and provide a distraction from the core task, they are an impediment. A broad array of text markup features in a chat room for example can add clarity and depth to a response, but where the purpose is to quickly glean student understanding on a topic, they can cause an unnecessary distraction.
Working memory
We can only hold so much information in our working memory at a time. In fact, when we’re working on a problem, our working memory can generally contend with as few as three or four different interacting elements at any one time (though there is some contention around this number, given the range of influences that may affect our capacity and the decay of memory under an array of differing environments).
As we strive to focus our attention on a problem, we determine our focus on the elements we feel we will need to hold in our working memory. As we hold those ideas in our working memory and then attempt to elaborate on them, we draw on our long-term memories as a reference point that will allow us to make sense of them. As we juggle these multiple components, any extraneous load , any burden that reduces the number of ideas in play reduces our overall capacity.
Mccrea observes that, “Good teachers don’t just manage what students do in the classroom, they manage what they think. Because what students think about is ultimately what they learn” (Mccrea, 2017). Digital tools can be a notable aid in our efforts to more deeply understand complex issues or to resolve complex problems. However, if the digital tools we use are overburdened with unnecessarily complex navigational elements or by poor design, or contain unnecessary features or complexity, they inevitably demand our attending in unnecessary ways.
When we use tools with a clear purpose that do one thing well, we improve the likelihood of increasing the available memory we need to dedicate to the problem at hand.
Domain-general skills
“Domain-general skills refer to general capabilities that are applicable, and widely transferable, across a broad range of tasks. The teaching of ‘21st-Century Skills’ or ‘Enterprise Skills’ – such as problem-solving, creativity, communication, teamwork and critical thinking – is founded on the assumption that these ‘domain-general’ skills exist, and can be taught, learned and transferred” (Lovell, 2020).
Using the simple tools approach, we can select digital tools that are simple in design and use them in classroom routines to achieve increasingly complex outcomes for students. This is also a method of supporting students to develop domain-general skills, that is, skills that are adaptable in a range of settings and that can underpin learning approaches that are not domain-specific.
There is another reason to give consideration to training students in domain-general skills, as these are the skills indelibly linked to the future careers of your students.
Creativity, problem-solving, teamwork, design and entrepreneurial skills – or what some call enterprise 21st-century or employability skills – are all demanded by employers. These skills are applicable to a broad range of careers and increasingly companies are looking for these skills ahead of more traditional qualifications.
Being able to respond to problems adaptably, to employ an enterprise skill set to new problems and to reflect effectively are skills vital to the employability of our young people.
There is another reason, however, that the simple tools approach supports the acquisition of these more flexible and adaptable skill sets, and that is that it supports our capacity to respond to failure.
By employing an iterative approach with young people to their employment of digital tools, by encouraging them to repeatedly reflect on the purpose and suitability of a tool for a task, students are more emboldened to contend with failure. We fail all the time, and it is our capacity to respond with a subset of skills that allow us to reflect and resiliently respond with purpose that enables progress.
It is through those repeated failures and our structured and reflective response to them that we build resilience and, perhaps, the grit to bounce back and find future success.
Digital tools and student success
The digital tools we use in the classroom should not overburden us with complexity, provide further barriers to learning or be unclear in their metacognitive benefit. Classroom tools should be clear in purpose and understood by students in a way that supports them to appreciate how else those tools might be employed in a variety of settings, not just in the classroom, but in their lives beyond it.
With a stronger appreciation for what constitutes design features that support the simple tool approach from the previous chapter, we might also now add four additional measures for success. These additional items are key considerations of simple tools design that influence the demand on a student’s working memory and reduce the impact of unnecessary extraneous load.
Elements – the number of elements present within the digital tool that the student must consider as they determine which features are relevant to the problem at hand.
Interactivity – how much the digital tool demands of our working memory is also influenced by the degree of interactivity required to contend with in the problem at hand. For example, a contribution to a branching conversation in a forum may require consideration for the previous contributions first. A contribution to a discussion forum that allows only an independent contribution from each student, one that does not relate to previous entries, requires less interactivity and has a lower demand on working memory.
Independence – how autonomous our students are able to be in work that employs a digital tool.
Speed of application – how briskly students are able to apply the digital resource as they work towards a resolution of the problem.
If a digital tool is only as complex as it needs to be within the demanded context of the work at hand, the student is advantaged. If it demands less of our limited amount of working memory and if it offers the student the opportunity to get started quickly without support, then the student is advantaged. And if the student has a range of simple digital tools at their disposal, and they appreciate how they can be leveraged effectively when presented with new problems, they are further advantaged.