Cognitive Load Theory: A Primer

The Centre for Education Statistics & Evaluation at the New South Wales (Australia) Department of Education recently released a short primer summarizing Cognitive Load Theory. Here’s a link to the website with the document. The text itself is a short, readable, seven pages and hits the main points in what I think is a fair and balanced summary.

Cognitive Load Theory came out from the work of John Sweller. He has also written a comprehensive book, or you could consult the creative visual summary of each chapter by Oliver Calgiol at this blog. I’ve blogged about this particularly where it pertains to the learning of chemistry. A one-sentence summary can be found in the second paragraph of the primer: “Research in cognitive load theory demonstrates that instructional techniques are most effective when they are designed to accord with how human brains learn and use knowledge.”

The two foundational principles of cognitive load theory are: (1) “there is a limit to how much new information the human brain can process at one time”, and (2) “there are no known limits to how much stored information can be processed at one time.” The key distinction is new versus stored information, or using working memory versus accessing long-term memory. Thus learning is a process of turning new things processed in working memory into schemas that “place” this new information in long-term storage in a way that it can be retrieved for continued learning to take place – building one block on top of another in a sense. However the limits of working memory mean that it can be overloaded, resulting in non-learning or worse, mis-learning.

There are three types of “loads” contributing to the overall cognitive load: intrinsic, extraneous and germane. Intrinsic load is “the inherent complexity of the material and the prior knowledge of the learner”. Extraneous load is “poorly designed instruction that does not facilitate appropriate schema construction” while germane load is its opposite. The way this translates into effective teaching is that at the introductory level teaching should be explicit and less open-ended “discovery”, but as the learner builds more complex schema, more student independence is built into the assignments. There is an excellent article by Paul Kirschner, mentioned in a previous blog post, discussing the confusion facing educators in the sciences between pedagogy and epistemology – confusing teaching science by inquiry versus teaching science as inquiry.

Several examples of research are provided that feed into recommendations for the classroom. But the authors are careful to discuss the relevance and limitations of their research in the final section of the primer. “Cognitive load theory is particularly relevant to teaching novice learners in so-called ‘technical’ domains such as mathematics, science and technology… Far less research has been done on whether [it] is effective for teaching in less technical, or more creative subjects areas – such as literature, history, art and other humanities subjects.” In addition, “the literature on cognitive load theory is also silent on how other factors besides cognitive load [such as learner motivation] might influence the effectiveness of learning.” But it’s an excellent primer overall, and well-worth the seven minutes it will take you to read it.