Teaching, of course, means having the objective of making people learn things and using the most effective means to do so.
Let’s imagine a large number of teaching specialists, people who are knowledgeable about the subject, the theories and the credible research results. Let’s ask them to name, say, five things that ideally everyone who teaches should know.
I would bet that almost every one of these people will name cognitive load theory among their five notions.
This is due to the work of John Sweller and his collaborators, and I present it briefly to you here. Dylan Wiliam assures that it is the most important thing for teachers to know. It’s very plausible.
If you don’t know her, I think it will be a great discovery. I will then have a question and a small gift.
A magic number
The starting point, to put it briefly and with an analogy that I hope is enlightening, is that we access the world through a window that opens and closes very quickly. This is called working memory.
The data, the new information, passes through there. But given these opening and closing limitations, few elements can enter simultaneously. How much ? George A. Miller suggested in 1956 that it was between 5 and 9, hence what is called the magic number: 7, plus or minus 2. It would be even less, it is often said today. But let’s leave it at that.
It is obvious that we do not stop there and that despite this strong limitation, we can understand lots of complex things, like reading this text. The reason is simple: we also have a long-term memory, where knowledge is stored thanks to which we can group elements presented to us. We can thus process an immense amount of information.
You know how to read. This is possible thanks to your prior knowledge. You understand words like immense, to treat, information. The sentence above does not overload your working memory.
To take a famous example: faced with a certain arrangement of pieces on a chessboard, the beginner does not see much, even if he looks for a long time. The master, at a glance, sees everything, can reproduce the arrangement of the pieces and knows how to checkmate in three moves. For what ? He has in his long-term memory the prior knowledge to do this: lots of parts that he knows by heart. This makes it possible to organize and store information which is then arranged and organized. Lots of information can then be combined into a single piece of data.
You’ve probably already guessed what this means for teaching, and that’s what Sweller and his colleagues have highlighted.
Cognitive load and teaching
The bottom line is this. We learned when we transferred new information into our long-term memory; but if we overload the working memory when teaching, learning will be difficult for the student, perhaps very difficult, or even impossible.
This involves various techniques that should be carefully applied, especially with beginners.
For example, we will want to know and we will take very seriously into account the prior knowledge possessed by the students we are addressing; we will use concrete examples; we will make sure not to use or at least minimize the use of elements that are not necessary; we will present the information verbally and with images; we will ensure that gradually and as students acquire skills, they solve problems on their own.
I can’t go into detail here, but this link will give you other strategies and concrete examples of ways to implement them.
Two final remarks.
The first one. Each time, to learn, you need prior knowledge in the field in question. Which allows us to say that they must be taught, in the right order, in each area of knowledge.
The second. The theory of cognitive load points strongly, especially, but not only for beginners, towards systematic, direct and explicit teaching, proceeding in carefully chosen and validated steps. Research confirms that it works…
A question and a gift
The question. I wonder if we teach this to future teachers. How do we talk about it, then? Much better than I could do here in three pages, without a doubt.
You will tell me if you want. I’m curious.
Gift. In one page, here is an interesting summary of what cognitive load implies for teaching.
I could translate the texts. If someone then makes a French version, I will distribute it.