One of the most important things a teacher can do to accelerate student learning is to reduce cognitive load of their students. Curious, quirky and seminal research has uncovered several surprising ways to do so. These require not much effort and could lead to significant learning gains.
Cognitive Load Theory states that our working memory, which is responsible for processing new information, has a limited capacity. Because of this, new material can easily be forgotten if it’s not transferred into long-term memory.
When working memory attempts to process too much information at once, this can lead to cognitive overload. Previous research has mainly focused on reducing redundant information or the Split-Attention Effect (you can read more about this in our blog; four ways to overcome cognitive overload).
This blog looks at 5 surprising changes you can make in your day-to-day classroom practice:
- Hand gestures
- Headings
- Group work
- Less classroom displays
- Calm emotions
5 strategies to reduce cognitive overload in your classroom
1. Use significative hand gestures
Typically, students learn through text and teacher explanations. However, adding significative hand gestures to the mix can reduce cognitive load, because they are easier to process. This is because our natural capacity to pick up non-verbal signals is activated when we learn through movement, lowering the storage demand on our working memory.
In a study conducted with Year 8 students in a Science class, researchers compared using hand gestures to more traditional teaching styles. One half of the group were taught four specific gestures to represent different parts of a theory, while the other half were not. The results found that students in the first group achieved higher test scores than those who weren’t taught with gestures.
So, using gestures to signify key concepts of your lesson can simplify the content and make it easier to grasp, reducing the strain on your students’ working memory.
2. Use headings
Research suggests that using headings in the form of questions can help to reduce cognitive load. For example, researchers conducted an experiment where they gave one group of students a piece of text that had questions dividing each paragraph, while another group received the same text without any headings.
The researchers found that participants in the headings group engaged in deeper cognitive processing and had a better comprehension of the text.
The interesting thing is that, perhaps counterintuitively, the added information from the headings didn’t lead to cognitive overload. Instead, it gave students the chance to relate the new information to what they already knew – a key step in that transfer of information from working memory to long-term memory.
3. Make the best of group work
Working in groups allows students to benefit from the Collective Working Memory Effect, which is when the cognitive load of a task is shared between group members. Because each student processes less information, they are less likely to get cognitively overloaded, which can help them to recall more information than when they work alone.
Interestingly, research suggests that group work is most effective for complex problem-solving tasks. This is because it allows students access to different perspectives and techniques for solving a problem rather than having to rack their brains to the point where they experience cognitive overload.
4. Minimise your classroom decorations
While classroom displays can be a nice way to reinforce classroom culture, excessive displays add unnecessary cognitive load and distract students. This happens because classroom displays compete for students’ attention and clog up space in working memory that they could be using to take on board lesson material.
Recent research has shown that students who learned in highly decorated classes (i.e., very colourful walls with many images) were 16% more distracted than students who learned in minimally decorated classrooms. After 15 lessons, once the decorations lost some of their novelty, this number reduced to 6%. But even though this percentage seems to lower with time, the difference is still there, showing that classroom displays still add extra cognitive load even once students are used to them.
To reduce this load, you can avoid overdecorating walls and position any displays out of students’ view when they are facing you.
5. Display calm emotions
Since negative emotions do not contribute to students’ learning, they are an extraneous cognitive load that takes up space in their limited working memory.
In an insightful study, medical students were exposed to two different outcomes of a simulation involving a patient. The patient either suffered a heart attack and died or was transferred to another facility and lived. Those who dealt with the patient’s death reported more negative emotions, experienced higher cognitive load and demonstrated lower learning outcomes compared to those who witnessed the patient live.
This suggests that helping students to stay calm during anxiety-provoking situations can ensure that these emotions don’t get in the way of their learning. You can do this by:
- Providing constructive and positive feedback
- Encouraging Growth Mindset – you can read the surprising link between growth mindset and cognitive load here.
- Creating a psychologically safe environment
Final thoughts
So, there you have it. Five potentially surprising ways to reduce cognitive load. Usually, when discussing cognitive load, people tend to think about the amount of information or how that information is displayed. As new research emerges, we are learning more and more ways on how best to optimise load for our students.
Using hand gestures, headings, group work, minimising distracting displays and managing emotions are potential avenues that research suggests are certainly worth considering.
