Cognitive Load: Balancing Pedagogies

In my previous post, I mentioned that I’ve been thinking about how to factor in cognitive load as I design activities in my classroom. My thinking was partly motivated by having just read a monograph by A.J. Martin based on his Vernon-Wall lecture [1] in 2015. The title of his lecture: “Can educators reduce students’ cognitive load and boost motivation and engagement? Integrating explicit instruction and discovery learning through Load Reduction Instruction (LRI).”

That’s quite a mouthful. Let’s break it down.

The goal of LRI is to optimize student learning and achievement. The trick is to match the cognitive demands required with where the students are developmentally in the learning process. In the early stages, when students are novices, a more structured approach (explicit instruction) that reduces cognitive load is required. This is because the novice mainly resorts to working memory, limited in its capacity. During this period, students gain fluency and build basic content and skills into long-term memory. This frees up working memory for further learning, and that’s when guided inquiry learning approaches can be a stepping-stone to autonomous learning. (We want students to learn how to learn!)

The focus on the article isn’t on achievement (there is a summary of previous work and an extensive citation list) but instead explores the effects of LRI on motivation and engagement. There is a Motivation and Engagement Wheel that encapsulates the main concepts of the article. It resembles a color wheel, except in the article I downloaded there was no color, just shades of grey, perhaps appropriately. I’ve also included a color version I found that uses traffic light colors from a quick Google search. Both are shown below. There is a more extensively annotated version later in the article not shown here. The monograph is dense with terminology but Martin clearly explains all the different pieces. (That’s probably why it is 35 pages long!)

 

The monograph contains a number of examples and practical suggestions included that illustrate the conceptual pillars of LRI. One section that I found quite interesting was the discussion on the southeast corner of the wheel. I had vague anecdotal notions of why my students would be anxious, and how this could result in poorer performance, but no particular conceptual framework to think about the issues involved. In a section on “Anxiety, failure avoidance, and self-handicapping”, Martin outlines the sources and downstream effects. Basically, anxiety, fear of failure, and other distractions, “may act as a source of extraneous cognitive load and tap the limited capacity of working memory”. These fears may also lead to self-defeating behavior, procrastination being one among many examples. The LRI pedagogical strategy in these cases is to reduce split-attention by carefully structuring the material to reduce the load on working memory.

A significant chunk of the article is devoted to discussing how LRI integrates both explicit instruction and inquiry-based learning, two pedagogies that are often portrayed (falsely in my opinion) as being in opposition to each other. The strawman in one corner is the “traditional lecture” and in the other corner we have “completely open-ended discovery”. These two approaches are philosophically rooted in positivist and constructivist approaches respectively. There is an extensive review of this debate in a book by Tobias and Duffy [2]. It prompted me to go back and re-read an excellent article from the book authored by Paul Kirschner [3]. I highly recommend it. The abstract is shown below.

Kirschner begins by defining epistemology and pedagogy. A scientist’s epistemology might be the “scientific method” (in its various guises). On the other hand, pedagogy refers to “strategies or styles of instruction”. Importantly, pedagogies can be (a) general, (b) domain-specific, or (c) specific to a certain approach to teaching. It is this third case that has caused the most misunderstanding as different groups tout their superior pedagogies. Three-letter acronyms are common, e.g., PBL = Problem Based Learning, TBL = Team Based Learning, and there is also LRI mentioned above. Kirschner quickly gets to the matter at hand. The most relevant section of the article to scientist-educators is appropriately titled: “Practicing Science or Learning to Practice Science?”

The movement in recent years has been towards constructivist approaches. (It’s more like the swinging back and forth of a pendulum, but discovery-based learning is what’s popular at the moment.) These voices declare that “inquiry into authentic questions generated from student experiences should be the central strategy for teaching science.” Kirschner quotes others: “The ultimate goal was to provide a learning environment in which students could feel like scientists in their own classrooms. This meant that our students would need to be involved in the acquisition of their scientific knowledge – not only reading and writing about – but actually doing science.”

As a chemist, I don’t disagree that students should be exposed to a curriculum that involves lab-based hands-on exercises. These are crucial to building important manual and observational skills, and can complement what the students are learning in the “lecture” portion of the course. However, touting the “doing science is the best way to learn science” as the primary pedagogical driving force at the introductory level is what I find questionable. The most recent PISA results would seriously question this credo, although oddly enough it hasn’t drawn much attention in the mass media. Martin somewhat alludes to this in his article, but Kirschner tackles it head on. I’m going to quote his clear prose [4].

“This focus is coupled to the assumption that to teach the process of science (i.e., the pedagogy), we can best confront learners with experiences either based on or equivalent to science procedures (i.e., the epistemology). This has led to a tenacious commitment by educators, instructional designers, and educational researchers to discovery and inquiry methods of learning which is based upon confusing teaching science as inquiry (i.e. an emphasis in the curriculum on the processes of science) with teaching science by inquiry (i.e. using the process of the science to learn science). The error here is that no distinction is made between the behaviors and methods of the scientist – who is an expert practicing her or his profession – and those of a student who is essentially a novice.”

“A student, as opposed to a scientist, is still learning about the subject area in question and, therefore, possesses neither the theoretical sophistication nor the wealth of experience of the scientist. Also, the student is learning science – as opposed to doing science – and should be aided in her/his learning through the application of an effective pedagogy and good instructional design.”

“[Discovery] presupposes a prior conceptual framework and the ability to interpret and sometimes reinterpret what has been seen or experienced in abstract terms, but there is no guarantee that it will lead to new concepts, much less correct ones. This is because, first, novices have little knowledge and experience in a domain which causes them to encode information at a surface or superficial level… Second, novices do not simply produce random guesses in the absence of knowledge, but rather as systematically off the mark in a particular way that makes sense given a particular misconception. The strangest and possibly most unfortunate aspect of this whole problem is that it is not new…”

Kirschner argues that “the lack of clarity about the difference between learning and doing science has led many educators to advocate the discovery method as the way to teach science.” This fits well with current trends. Kirschner’s article was 7-8 years ago. Constructivist pedagogies have been further on the rise since. It is unfortunate that “lecture” has been getting a bad rap. There is a place for lectures amongst the different pedagogies. Experienced educators in the trenches will utilize a variety of pedagogies. You know what works, what doesn’t, and you constantly try to hone your methods with each group of students. What worked in the past may not work in the present. The problem is when administrators or governing bodies demand a particular pedagogy be used because it is deemed a “best practice”. In tertiary education, much autonomy still rests with the professor. But in primary and secondary education, the confusion between epistemology and pedagogy could result in some poor practices. As the unbundling of education continues, however, the problems may mount. We should be watchful, thoughtful and act accordingly.

[1] The Vernon-Wall lectures are part of the annual conference of the Psychology of Education Section of the British Psychological Society. The official citation for this monograph is: Martin A. J. (2016). Using Load Reduction Instruction (LRI) to boost motivation and engagement. Leicester, UK: British Psychological Society.

[2] Tobias, S. & Duffy, T. M. (Eds.) (2009). Constructivist Instruction: Success or Failure? New York, NY: Routledge.

[3] P. A. Kirschner (2009). Epistemology or Pedagogy, That is the Question.

[4] I have left out the references and a number of intervening paragraphs between the three quoted. I recommend reading the entire article.