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=Cognitive Load Theory - Features and Violations=

=Features:= As a high school teacher who has to differentiate instruction and be cognizant of my young learners' sense of motivation, I am drawn to certain features of Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory (CLT). When faced with a difficult task, most of my high school students do not have the "staying power" to complete it if their frustrations overwhelm them. The emphasis on working memory and the cognitive structures necessary to make that working memory productive are the basis of the CLT theory. Sweller's theory reminds me that I need to be very careful about the presentation of new material, so as not to overwhelm students with ** extraneous load **. The article from the Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning states that "extraneous cognitive load is caused by inappropriate instructional designs that ignore working memory limits and fail to focus working memory resources on schema construction and automation." Such extraneous load requires that the instructor redesign materials/instruction so that working memory is not so strained and that the focus becomes on building, or constructing, useful schema. Schema automation (with practice) becomes the tools of long term memory, and thus the student __learns__.

When I teach grammatical and syntactical elements to my students, that instruction is naturally complex, and thus the ** intrinsic cognitive load ** is high. I am reminded to be sensitive to that load and must design my instruction to support schema construction and not working load memory interference. One effect that stood out to me and that interferes with working memory (and therefore schema construction) is **  ﻿ ﻿ the split-attention effect. **  ﻿ ﻿ ﻿When "attention must be split between multiple sources of visual information that are all essential for understanding" this imposes great strain on working memory. The focus of the instruction can get lost in the complexity of the visual presentation. It is important to integrate images and text so as to reduce that strain on working memory and make the visual design of instruction effective. My "ah-ha" moment came when I realized that pictures and text were both processed through the visual channel and therefore must not interfere with each other - they must work in harmony. If I give a //PowerPoint// presentation to explain a grammatical or syntactical element and the slide contains textual explanations AND a diagram AND I am explaining the element, then I am doing not only causing extraneous load, but I am also guilty of the ** redundancy effect ** - presenting "multiple sources of information in which one source is sufficient to allow for understanding and learning while the other sources merely reiterate the information of the first source in a different form." Guilty, as charged. My students probably leave feeling overwhelmed and exhausted because I have essentially presented the material to them twice!

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=Violations:=
 * Split-attention effect **and ** extraneous load **: Like I have said before, I am an English teacher, so anything that has the word "Physics" in the title is already going to have a ** high intrinsic cognitive load **for me. MSNBC is my homepage, and is often the place I get the quick news of my day. During the height of the BP oil spill, I remember seeing this article about what happens during a massive spill and thinking, "I don't have time to figure this out." I felt like the physics teacher down the hall could give me a more effective verbal explanation while I looked at the picture. ** Reducing the split-attention and using the dual-modality of auditory and visual processing would have made this more effective **. Of course, it's a website - static information, so unless it was turned into a video, the text would have to be more integrated into the diagram to reduce the ** extraneous load **of looking left-right-down. Such mental integration causes an extremely high extraneous load. While the diagram is professionally drawn, the text short, and the graph clear, the combination of the three is overwhelming. If one does have the "staying power" to read and understand it, the site does offer the option of clicking on the legend next to the graph. The picture changes, and at times the text becomes more integrated with the image, but overall there is ** too much mental integration required **. These elements are seemingly simple in isolation, but put together to teach the concept of the "physics of an oil spill" ** impose too much on working memory **.

You can view this site by clicking on the link below: @http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37517080/ns/disaster_in_the_gulf/

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