Have you ever noticed that once you reach a certain point in learning a complex new idea, it suddenly becomes simpler? It may be a sudden “AH-HA!” moment, or gradually understanding more than he previously understood. Either way, once you’ve gained a basic understanding of the material, learning new additions becomes significantly easier. On the contrary, when you are first exposed to information, it seems like a wall of new concepts that you have to climb without a ladder.
When you present complex ideas and new concepts to your audience, they face the same challenge. They are in unfamiliar territory and cannot distinguish the relationships or relevance of sections of the material. They don’t know what they don’t already know and what is the best way to acquire that new information. Furthermore, they can only have a limited number of pieces of information in their minds at a time with which to build cognitive relationships between ideas. Seminal to these ideas, George Miller put forth the psychological idea that humans can only hold five to seven separate concepts in their short-term memory at the same time, while. John Sweller expanded on this idea with the concepts of cognitive load and related information schema (Sweller, 1988) suggesting that the arrangement of the content presented had a significant impact on learner adoption of the material. Additionally, Sweller proposed that goal-oriented problem solving might not be the best way to initially learn new material, as the student may focus more on solving the problem than on the principles it represents.
As producers of online educational material, we must take these ideas to heart, because a main focus of our planning and design must be the motto of the most effective means of delivering complex ideas in smaller, more accessible pieces. This is not as difficult to implement as it seems, and has been well described in numerous texts on the subject.
To develop some of Sweller’s (Sweller, 1999) main points, there are four specific recommendations on cognitive load and design of instructional material:
When presenting problems as learning tools, structure them in a way that emphasizes learning the elements of the process, rather than simply achieving an end result.
Let’s say you are trying to educate the student on how to perform a conversion from feet to meters. You should emphasize the calculations made, and not the final result. In this way, you focus your attention on the actual goal, rather than a perceived goal.
Combine supporting elements so that the learner does not have to divide their attention among several sources of information.
If you are presenting a picture of a car engine to teach the location of engine parts, label and describe the parts within the picture, rather than creating a separate caption for the student to refer to. If possible, isolate the relevant part of the image and the supporting text, audio, animation, or interaction to present only some related elements. Break down complex processes and concepts into smaller, cognitively accessible pieces.
Eliminate unnecessary thinking about interpreting the meaning of redundant items.
Have you ever sat through a presentation where the speaker simply read the words projected on a screen? If so, then you understand the unnecessary repetition. Repetition is an important part of learning, but redundant pieces of information serve to distract rather than reinforce if they do not add additional information or allow for another interpretation.
Increases working memory by stimulating more than one sense in a non-redundant way.
The truth is, for online or e-learning content, we are still limited to sight and sound to present information and understanding, but we can use these forms of media creatively. For example, a video of performing a physical exercise can provide visual and auditory information that a student can interpret due to her previous spatial and kinesthetic experience. Illustrations of working with a piece of electronic equipment can provide essential relational information when the animation focuses on its maintenance or placement within a larger machine.
Adherence to these points can help students develop a network or relationships between areas of knowledge that Sweller refers to as a schema (Sweller, 1999). A scheme or scheme is an internal representation of the world or an area of knowledge that acts as a model for the construction of new structures of understanding in the learned material. A developed scheme allows an expert in an area to discern what new information is useful and must be translated into knowledge, and what information is superfluous. This is a psychology-based explanation of how the acquisition of knowledge in an area is an accelerated process, depending on previous experience and cognitive relationships already formed by the learner.
To break this down into tasks for you, the learning content designer:
1. Take complex data and break it down into smaller learning tasks.
2. Use multiple media types, like text and images, to create stronger connections between related data.
3. Integrate media types closely to reduce the number of concepts a student must have in mind at one time.
4. Design your content so that each section builds on the previous section, to help the student develop an outline more quickly.
Miller, GA, The magic number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our ability to process information. Psychological review, 6381-97 (1956).
Sweller, J., Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning, Cognitive Science, 12, 257-285 (1988).
Sweller, J., Instructional Design in Technical Areas, (Camberwell, Victoria, Australia: Australian Council for Educational Research (1999).