Good learning design is all about cognitive load
This is one of a series of posts aimed at teachers, and any others, who are interested in learning design.
When you study to become a teacher, you learn a bunch of educational psychology. Most of us remember Vygotsky and Piaget, and maybe a bit about their theories (zone of proximal development stuck with me). However, the overarching ideas that stuck with me after my teacher training were:
There are a bunch of educational theories.
They are based on varying levels of data, some of which seemed a bit flaky.
Either they are all true, or some are true, we don’t really know.
It was a few years into my teaching career when I read the book How I Wish I Had Taught Maths by Craig Barton. This opened my eyes to the world of evidence-based teaching based on cognitive science that cut past the vagaries of the list above. As a science teacher, I liked the idea of using the science of learning as a basis for my teaching.
When I started working as a learning designer, it was refreshing to see a focus on evidence-based practices - namely those coming from cognitive load theory and Mayer’s multimedia principles. It's also possible that I got lucky, because my first manager, Paul Moss, was really really into cognitive load theory and its implications for learning design.
Why the emphasis on cognitive load theory in learning design? The reason is simple… it works. We know it works because there is evidence that it works. If we want to do a good job as a learning designer, we need to be effective at helping somebody learn. Students are paying a lot of money and giving up a lot of time to study - we can’t afford to waste this on ineffectual and unproven methods.
I made the slide below when I gave a presentation on learning design to visiting academics from China. It only contains a few implications of cognitive science, but it's a start.
Looking back at this, there’s certainly more that could be added (e.g. connect all new learning to prior knowledge). However, I went for the top three that I believe make a difference to student learning, compared to how someone might ordinarily teach. These are equally applicable for a learning designer or a teacher.
Working memory is limited - we can only hold something like 3-4 items in our head at a time when processing and learning new information. This means instructors need to present ideas in “chunks” of related information that can be comfortably processed. An easy way to do this in online learning is to limit the length of videos and explanations. In face-to-face learning, we need to break up the presentation of new ideas with other activities.
Our long-term memory gets strengthened when we use what we’ve learned, or “we remember what we think about”. This can be done with quiz questions, live interactive polling and questioning in lectures, discussions between students, and assessment tasks. Another way of thinking about this is that we forget what we don’t think about, surprisingly quickly, so we need to “use it or lose it”.
We get overloaded if we are trying to think about lots of things unrelated to what we are learning. Face-to-face, this could be a freezing cold room, students talking at the back of the lecture theatre, being stressed about making friends, or not being able to log in to the learning management system. In online learning, this could be a confusing navigation system, overly complex diagrams or hard-to-read fonts. These things seem like they shouldn’t matter, but they do! This is why experienced teachers focus on getting the logistics of their teaching right, like having spare pens, and having the equipment for an experiment carefully organised. For a learning designer in the online world, this is why user-experience design is so important, like having predictable navigation and clear language.
As I said, there’s obviously a lot more to it than this! But it’s clear that good learning design, like good teaching, is informed by cognitive science. I am not a trained academic in this field, but the links above will take you to more written by those who are.