244: Three Ways You May Be Cognitively Overloading Your Students
Feb 17, 2025
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Blake Harvard, an AP psychology teacher and author of "Do I Have Your Attention?", dives into the challenges of cognitive overload in education. He outlines three common teaching practices that can confuse students without teachers even realizing it. Blake shares practical strategies to simplify instruction and enhance clarity by understanding cognitive processes. He also discusses the impact of information overload and offers tips for presenting material cohesively. This conversation is a must-listen for educators seeking to optimize learning!
Cognitive overload in students can result from teachers inadvertently overwhelming them with unnecessary details and complex strategies during instruction.
By understanding cognitive science principles, educators can simplify their teaching to enhance clarity and better facilitate student learning.
Deep dives
Understanding Cognitive Overload
Cognitive overload can occur when teachers unknowingly overwhelm students with excessive information or complex instructional strategies. This can impair students’ ability to process and retain new information effectively. Recognizing the limitations of working memory, educators can refine their teaching approaches to reduce cognitive load. By aligning instruction with cognitive science principles, teachers can create clearer learning experiences that facilitate better student understanding.
Strategies to Mitigate Cognitive Overload
Three specific instructional choices that contribute to cognitive overload are the seductive details effect, split attention effect, and redundancy effect. The seductive details effect occurs when teachers divert attention to tangentially related stories or details instead of focusing on crucial concepts. The split attention effect happens when information is scattered across different sources, making it difficult for students to integrate knowledge. Redundancy arises when teachers present the same information in multiple formats, forcing students to choose which to focus on, leading to confusion.
The Role of Instructional Clarity
To enhance learning, it is vital for teachers to present information in cohesive and accessible ways that minimize extraneous cognitive load. This could involve using graphic organizers and limiting extraneous details within presentations, thereby allowing students to concentrate on essential material. Simplifying instruction does not mean compromising content; rather, it focuses on presenting information in relatable and straightforward manners. Teachers can ensure clarity by making intentional choices that emphasize key concepts while avoiding distracting and irrelevant details.
The Balance of Complexity and Simplicity
The overarching idea in effective teaching is that less can be more, especially when addressing complex concepts. Teachers often feel the need to enhance instruction with elaborate strategies, but this can backfire by adding to cognitive overload instead of alleviating it. Stripping down lessons to their fundamental elements helps students process and assimilate information more effectively. By adopting this philosophy, educators can better design their lessons to meet the cognitive needs of their students.
When we make certain choices, often without even realizing it, we can turn a teaching moment from one that should be clear into one that's confusing. Luckily, these choices are pretty easy to spot and fix once we know what to look for, and cognitive science can help us understand what's going on. In this episode I'm going to talk about three of these with Blake Harvard, who writes the Effortful Educator blog and has just published a new book, Do I Have Your Attention? Understanding Memory Constraints and Maximizing Learning.