Are your teaching materials holding your students back?
You’ve spent HOURS and HOURS designing your newest PowerPoint presentation for your upcoming lesson, and you’ve created a supporting handout as a takeaway for your students. You’ve tried to include all the bells and whistles in your presentation. Whizz bang animations and transitions, videos, photos, illustrations and graphs. You’ve packed it all in there – what a resource!!! Or is it?
Cognitive Load on Learning
Before we get into the specifics of the scenario, have you ever heard of Cognitive Load Theory (CLT)? This theory is based on both short-term and long-term memory, and how much new information the human brain can process as opposed to accessing long-term memory for organising existing information and making links. To keep this really simple, think of the brain as a collection of containers – we have a small container for our working, or short-term memory, and a massive container for our long-term memory and this one has all sorts of drawers and compartments in it. When something goes into our long-term memory it is organised and filed away with a complex indexing system that links it to something else already in our long-term memory. However, our short-term memory can only hold around four small bits of information at any time. What our brain is doing constantly is working out which bits to keep and store away in long-term memory, and which bits to discard. As educators, our goal is to get as much of the key, important information into that long-term memory. Easy, right?
Let’s think about how much stimulus the brain is taking in each second. We will keep this scenario to a face-to-face setting to allow a description of the environment. We set up the room with three tables of 5 seats. You have your presentation projected up on the front wall and a whiteboard next to it with a bunch of different posters on the wall. There is another classroom right next door and they are doing a group activity and it is quite noisy. You’ve already placed the supporting handout on the tables.
Your students come in and sit down, chatting as they come in. As you begin your session, these students have already got something going on in their working memories based on the conversations they were having on the way in, or what they are planning to buy for lunch in an hour.
Challenge 1: you need to clear out the noise from their working memories to make sure the topic of the day has as much space in there as possible.
What do you do? This is where trainers will generally use an anticipatory set, also known as an icebreaker activity. We want to reset the mind and focus on what is to come. You run your icebreaker and everything is going great.
Time for your masterpiece! The Mother of all PowerPoint presentations. You have 168 slides for the 1 hour session, and they all have animations and transitions to show off how great you are at using PowerPoint and to keep the interest of the students. When you have pictures fly in they make a swooshing sound through the speakers in the ceiling. Pretty cool! You are delivering the content, talking, hands waving around as you explain things and move through your amazing slides. You ask a question of the students….crickets….they are all staring at you blankly. Are they seriously not listening? Have all of them zoned out? But you’ve created this amazing presentation!
What is the impact?
Now, let’s stop and think about the stimulus that your student’s brains are processing at this very second.
Tommy is tapping his pencil on the table, which is taking the attention of the other 4 people at his table, so the 5 people at this table have used up 1 piece of information in their working memories.
The class next door is noisy and you can clearly hear the conversations breaking through, including keywords and mentions of names. This takes up another piece of information in the group’s working memories.
Your current slide has a heading in one colour, text in full sentences in another colour and an image that has flown in from the side as an animation. There are three pieces of information to process here, and the animation just adds another thing to pay attention to.
You have a habit of reading the text on the slides to the class verbatim before you then explain the concept a bit more. So they’ve already read the text and had it take up space in their working memory, now you’re reading it to them and it is doubling up.
You are quite animated with your hands and they are waving around as you speak – this distracts a number of the students and one is looking at the detail on the sleeves of your outfit wondering where you bought it.
Other students aren’t paying attention to you or your orchestra conducting hands, but they are looking at the posters next to the whiteboard and projector screen, reading the information about the upcoming twilight markets which has pushed all of your content out of their working memory and they are wondering what they have on in their calendar that night.
What is being described in this scenario is cognitive overload. Our chance of getting anything we are showing students, or saying, has very little to no chance of making it into that long-term memory. There are lots of considerations when it comes to cognitive load that we can’t go into here, however, we will explore some of the key items related to this particular scenario.
When we present information to learners that are not directly relevant to what they are learning or is presented in multiple ways, the information becomes redundant and takes up space in the working memory unnecessarily. Examples of this include:
Reading the text on the PowerPoint slides (audio and visual load as two separate pieces of information)
A picture of a scene and that scene is then fully described in the text next to it
Requiring students to refer to two separate pieces of information and process them together to understand the concept requires a very high cognitive load. For example, watching a video with steps on how to perform a task, but there is no audio. Instead, students have a handout to read while watching the video to piece it together (consider how this impacts hearing-impaired students who often have to do this).
What can be done differently?
How can our trainer in this scenario work with this information and improve the session for next time?
Remove all the unnecessary bells and whistles from the PowerPoint presentation.
Little to no animations (only use when adding value, such as holding back a key point to ask a question)
Removal of sound effects on animations and transitions
Including keywords and text only on the slides. This is not a textbook, it is a summary. Also, reduce the number of slides. There are way too many for a one-hour session! Information overload along with cognitive overload.
Restrict images to those that add to the message and don’t distract from the message. If there is an image that will reinforce the message of the text, keep it close to the text so they can be related to each other and help lodge the information into the long-term memory through existing connections (this is where images help with retention).
Videos should add value to the content and demonstrate something new to the students. It should be spot on with the topic, and not be additional information to process that is not needed.
Consider the stimulus that is around the room that can distract students. If the presentation is projected to the front of the room, don’t have posters right next to it. Students will be distracted and read the words on different topics and that takes up valuable working memory! Everything is related and linked.
The trainer should keep in mind their own movements and waving of hands as well as positioning within the room. This all adds to what the learner is absorbing and impacts their cognitive load.
While some of this information is about general instructional techniques (positioning, distractions, etc) a lot of it is based on the correct use of technology in education and knowing how to use the tools available. Knowing the steps involved in creating a PowerPoint presentation doesn’t mean that it will be used effectively. Additionally, knowing how to create a ‘pretty’ presentation also does not mean that it will be effective.
Educators need to take that next step of understanding how to effectively use the digital tools available to them in the best way possible for their students. There are many different aspects to CLT in the design of learning resources for both face-to-face delivery and online learning.
Our Educator Capability Licence (ECL) focuses on how technology can be used to streamline the role of the educator and improve teaching, training and assessing practices.