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Theodore Whitfield's avatar

I agree that it can sometimes be difficult to see how CLT affects the classroom teacher in practice. Here are my personal thoughts:

1. Working memory is limited. Some people can hold only a few items in working memory, while others can hold more, but in general the number of items is always going to be fairly small. It's easy to overwhelm working memory, and when that happens then it becomes very difficult to learn anything. Take-away message for teachers: it's easy to overestimate how much a student can handle, and instructors must be constantly on the alert that you're not flooding working memory.

2. The idea of not overwhelming working memory leads very naturally into the concept of scaffolding. Again, the main take-away is to proceed slowly, always monitoring the student to see if they are keeping up with the flow of information.

3. Given that working memory is a limited resource, we should want students to use as much of it as possible on the actual content to be learned (that's intrinsic load), and as little of it as possible on anything else (that's extraneous load). Take-away message for teachers: eliminate distracting elements from the lesson so that students can focus on what's important.

4. One source of extraneous cognitive load is poorly designed course materials. Good visual design helps to reduce this extraneous load, and can assist the student in devoting working memory to the lesson. This doesn't mean that everything has to have crazy wild graphics, but rather that the materials are organized and reasonably presented. Take-away message: layout and design your materials well in order to lessen extraneous cognitive load.

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Paul Kirschner's avatar

Dylan, it's not a case of "ok so there are three types of load: intrinsic, germane, and extraneous…” because there are only two! intrinsic and extraneous. We (and that means John and his co-researchers) dropped germane years ago. To quote him:

Because working memory resources that need to be devoted to learning are determined by intrinsic and extraneous cognitive load, no instructional consequences of germane cognitive load have been identified and so germane cognitive load is no longer considered an independent source of load and the term is less commonly used."

From: The Development of Cognitive Load Theory: Replication Crises and Incorporation of Other Theories Can Lead to Theory Expansion

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