Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Reducing Cognitive Load: Accommodating the Limitations
of Working Memory
We can accommodate the limitations of working memory by reducing cognitive load
in three primary ways:
•
Chunking
•
Automaticity
•
Distributed processing
Chunking.
Chunking is the process of mentally combining separate items into
larger, more meaningful units (Miller, 1956). For example, the sequence 9, 0, 4, 6, 2,
0, 1, 7, 5, 2 is the phone number for one of your authors, but it is not written as phone
numbers appear. Now, as normally written, 904-620-1752, it has been “chunked”
into three larger units, which reduces cognitive load. Interestingly, working memory
is sensitive only to the number of chunks and not their size. “Although the number
of elements is limited, the size, complexity and sophistication of elements [are] not”
(Sweller et al., 1998, p. 256).
Developing Automaticity.
If you have an electric garage door opener, it is likely
that you sometimes cannot remember if you have put the garage door down when
you left home, so you drive back to check, and you see that you have indeed closed it.
Automaticity
, which is the ability to perform mental operations with little awareness
or conscious effort (Feldon, 2007; Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977), can explain your
actions. You put the garage door down without thinking about it.
Automaticity is a second way of reducing cognitive load, and computer key-
boarding skill is an example of its power and efficiency. Once our word processing
capabilities become automatic, we can devote our working memory space to the
composition of our writing. Until then, we must devote working memory to placing
our hands on the keys, and the cognitive load becomes too great to compose quality
products. This explains why students compose better essays on word processors but
only if they are skilled at word processing. Also, students' grammar, punctuation,
and spelling must eventually become automatic if they are to be good writers, and
essential teaching skills, such as questioning, are automatic for expert teachers.
Using Distributed Processing
. Earlier we saw that the visual-spatial sketchpad
and the phonological loop are independent, so each can perform mental work with-
out taxing the resources of the other (Baddeley, 1986, 2001). This suggests that
learning is made easier if verbal explanations are combined with visual representa-
tions (Clark & Mayer, 2003; Moreno & Duran, 2004). For example, suppose you
buy a new end table. You are in the process of assembling it, so you attempt to fol-
low the directions. Completing the assembly job is much easier if you have both
the diagrams and the words as guides. The visual processor supplements the verbal
processor and vice versa. When teaching, “The integration of words and pictures is
made easier by lessons that present the verbal and visual information together rather
than separated” (Clark & Mayer, 2003, p. 38).
Teachers at the junior high, high school, and university levels often use words,
alone, to present information, which reduces learning by wasting some of working
memory's processing capability and often imposing a cognitive load greater than
working memory's capacity.
