by Bill Schiano (May 7, 2021)
What is Cognitive Load?
Humans, like computers, have a finite amount of working memory they can use before becoming overtaxed. For educators, there are two types of cognitive load to consider: intrinsic, which is inherent to the topic you’re teaching and the complexity thereof, and extraneous, which is how the topic is presented and how you’re regulating both your attention and that of your students while teaching.
If you are teaching a class synchronously—whether online, in person, or hybrid—some examples of extraneous load may include the following:
- Remembering students’ names and calling patterns
- Reading online chat windows (if some or all students are virtual)
- Keeping track of time
- Maintaining eye contact
- Monitoring students’ body language
To avoid feeling overwhelmed, the key is to reduce extraneous load as much as possible and free up working memory to focus on what’s intrinsically valuable. By using the following strategies when designing and teaching your classes, you’ll be able to cover more of what matters while spending less mental energy on what doesn’t.
Designing Courses to Maximize Mental Efficiency
Start by asking yourself, “What can I do to plan ahead?” When you’re thinking about an upcoming semester, ask yourself these five questions.
1. What can I reuse?
When asking this question, define “reuse” very broadly. It doesn’t just mean, “Can I reuse the same material?” (Which you can and should do if you’re able.) Rather, it means that you’re making the most of your time. For me, I’ve found that for a 15-week course, I will devote about 15 hours each week to prepare. I try to make sure I use that time as effectively as possible. Any new material I select will take longer to prep and require more mental energy to learn, which in turn gives me less time and energy for other things I may find useful, such as experimenting with teaching or presentation methods or developing and grading assignments.
I balance that out by identifying questions, techniques, or other materials that I’ve used in previous classes that I could easily adapt for the new topic. I try to identify if my students already have techniques, models, frameworks, or even knowledge gained from other courses that they can bring into my class. Wherever possible, I reduce the amount of extraneous novel information I have to present—and that students have to absorb—so we can all focus on the new information that’s most critical.
As a broader point, this question also extends to whether your energy is best used to create new content for your courses in the first place. Last year, I could have been working on writing new cases, but I saw the difficulties that students and colleagues were having with the transition to online learning and decided that new material would be more disruptive than helpful.
2. Is my coursework aligned with the core goals of the course?
Ask yourself if your course is challenging in the right dimensions—do students need to know everything about a certain topic, or is some of it extraneous? Can you peel off certain elements as beyond the scope of what you’re trying to accomplish?
As educators, it’s easy to fall into the trap of convincing ourselves that everything is essential. “I had to learn all of this, so my students do, too.” If you can let go of that and focus on a core that you think is the most valuable—especially in the online environment, where you’re likely only covering 80 percent of what you would in a physical classroom—then you’ll be more successful.
3. Have I modularized the topics we’ll cover?
Where possible, break up your course into small pieces. Generally, the advice is 5- to 10-minute pastures, but I’ve found that 15 minutes is fine if it’s a particularly compelling segment.
Ideally, keep the topics independent of each other so that, if you don’t have the time or capacity for one, then you can always address it in a later session. If you design a class so that the topics need to follow a certain order, such as A-B-C-D, then that constrains you if the B pasture takes a little longer than expected or there is a compelling opportunity to move from B to D.
4. Am I sequencing and integrating the topics?
That said, the topics shouldn’t be so independent that you can’t fit them within a larger sequence. Developing patterns of coursework over classes—in this case, knowing that certain pastures typically follow each other—helps move the teaching process from working memory to long-term memory. This frees up mental energy to add on or “scaffold” new topics and material on those established patterns.
The more we’re able to tie topics together, both to each other within the course and to other relevant courses or even life experiences, the more we’re moving to long-term memory and freeing up cognitive load in the moment. I teach case courses, and they can often be very staccato. As a result, I try to identify links—in week five, I’m asking myself how I can tie the day’s discussion to the previous week, and the one before that, and so on, as well as foreshadowing upcoming cases. The more links you can establish, the more you and your students are engaging with a set of pre-existing knowledge rather than just memorizing material.
5. Does my course plan encourage student preparation?
There’s a lot of information out there on encouraging student preparation—but it’s particularly important to focus on the kind of preparation that reduces cognitive load. A good example is group work: the “divide and conquer” approach—where certain students read different aspects of the material and summarize it for the others—limits the number of novel concepts each individual student has to absorb, which in turn reduces the number of concepts you have to individually teach.
