Posted on by Dr James Shea

What Cognitive Load Theory needs to consider: not all effort is the same

The application of Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) to teaching and learning premises on quite a straightforward idea: there’s an intrinsic difficulty to learning tasks, often made harder by extraneous load, whether that’s a cluttered slide deck with no dual coding or insufficient worked examples. Clean up the learning event and you can enable all pupils to access the intrinsic learning more efficiently. As the heading of standard 2 says in the Core Content Framework (CCF) for all new teachers, “How [all] Pupils Learn”. Only, it seems, that’s not how all pupils learn. Because learning something new actually takes effort to pay attention. And effort, it seems, is not the singular thing that many seem to think it is.

A new (2024) paper out has targeted this limited understanding of ‘effort’. It is open access and you can read it for yourself here. But it has implications for teachers and how we think about learning so it is important for us to look at their key findings.

The authors divide effort into three key areas.

Effort required by the complexity of the task.

The harder it is, the more effort. We know a lot about this. Not enough difficulty and we become apathetic and demotivated. Too much difficulty and we get disillusioned. This is the area CLT is focused on. Let’s enable pupils to tackle more difficult tasks by reducing the extraneous load and improving their ability to tackle things through worked examples and well designed dual coding.

Effort required to focus (including how much you are averse to focusing on it!)

The continuous focus a task demands is not related to its difficulty. You could be having to complete a large spreadsheet using very similar tasks over and over. Copy and pasting and calculating. It requires focus, but it’s not hard. In fact it’s quite boring. Boring, it seems, requires more effort. It’s painful to have to focus when something is boring. I think we can all think of examples of this one!

Motivational effort

Generally, students are ready to allocate effort if they are motivated. These can be extrinsically motivated via deferred gratification (e.g. qualifications and monetary rewards) and intrinsically motivated such as through epistemic curiosity or prior positive experiences. However, students can also not be motivated by deferred gratification. ImPact’s latest report on pupil absence suggests persistently absent pupils are less motivated by deferred gratification and that a sense of belonging could be more powerful in providing motivation.

To put this into teacher terms and get an understanding of how all 3 types affect a single task with a consistent intrinsic load, let us think about the act of marking and assessment.

To assess a work against criteria, you have to conceptually hold the entire work in your head. This can be quite difficult for longer extended writing pieces with large amounts of information. You also have to have the subject knowledge to assess it whether for subject content or for spelling and grammar. There is an innate and intrinsic difficulty to assessment (sometimes made unnecessarily harder by illegible handwriting and no quiet working space to concentrate on the marking!)

To mark work, you have to focus. That’s actually quite hard for many who have to assess. To mark for one hour takes focus and concentration. It’s tiring and sometimes you are too tired to mark. Sometimes you have to mark huge amounts like during mock examinations or when you are working as an examiner and you are grinding through endless similar answers over and over.

And that leads us to motivation. Remember the days of triple marking and multiple colour pens? Of ‘Verbal Feedback Given’ stamps? Or even today’s double and triple mock examinations where schools are trying to wring extra points out of pupils via exam practice. You might not always be that motivated to mark these. You might feel this should be outsourced (as some schools do) and that a third set of mocks is not spending your time well. You may well really dislike marking, which may be viewed as a tax on your ‘free’ time. Many polls of teachers find this one of the least liked areas of teaching. It’s no secret exam boards struggle to recruit examiners.

And so it’s not enough just to think about the difficulty of marking. You have to think about the need to focus during the act of marking and the motivation needed to do your marking. It’s why we do things like whole class feedback instead of marking whole sets of books. Marking whole sets of books with detailed annotation can require lots of effort even though it is not actually hard to do.

Now reflect on effort in your lessons – the same principles around effort applies to students. We need to think not just about the first area of effort which CLT attempts to optimise, but also the other two areas of focus and motivation. A group of trust leaders told Jon Severs of the TES that a more diverse curriculum with less content to cover (to summarise his meeting with them) might mean students can focus on English and maths more effectively because they have other subjects which they really, and I mean really, enjoy, but more importantly also make them feel part of the school and motivated to enjoy school. We have to see school not just made up of tiny episodes of teaching and learning which all pupils experience in the same way, but as a ‘whole’ school experience for a diverse range of learners who need to be able to generate the three types of effort needed to enjoy and succeed during their time in school.

Posted on by Dr James Shea

Working memory: could it be that it’s just poor resolution rather than 4-7 items?

We’ve all had the lecture. You can only hold so many items in your working memory because there are only so many slots. It’s in the Core Content Framework (CCF) for trainee teachers. It’s in the Early Careers Framework for recently qualified teachers. And it’s in all the NPQs. If I undertake sequence of colour, number, or items of information tests on you then, after between four and seven items, depending on context, you cannot remember the sequence accurately. Here is what it says in the CCF:

And so we break down instructions into small ‘chunks’. We think about capacity all the time and use it for instructional coaching. Granularity is key. But that idea of working memory having a limit, having only so many slots, is not the only idea in psychology. There is another theory which has just as much validity as the fixed idea. An idea that suggested we could be using many more items than 4-7 in teaching and it would still work. Welcome to the world of low resolution memories…

One competing idea is that the limit on capacity is based on resource rather than a fixed number of slots. It’s nothing new – it’s been around as long as the ‘slots’ idea and instead of slots, it says that working memory is a fluid pool of resources. In other words, you can remember a few things with precision, but that when you overload working memory the result isn’t a total failure to remember additional items, but a degradation in the quality of the memory of all eight items. It’s like pouring your working memory into 8 jars instead of 7. It’s spread around more thinly. The more items, the more pixelated (to use a modern term) the memory. If you want sharp resolution, then keep the number lower, if the outline is important and you’ll be adding resolution over time then the detail isn’t so important at the start. For example, an important part of kinesiology is knowing all 206 bones in the human body. But you still start with the skeleton of all 206. You will probably then divide the skeleton up into groups of more than 4-7 bones. You add detail as you go down so that magnitudinally, the memory can zoom out and in as it is needed. In many ways, it makes good sense to start with a very poor pixelated skeleton memory and then build detail up, rather than start with small detail of 4-7 items. Having the ‘whole’ in your memory, no matter how grainy, can work well when adding detail later on and being able to construct the fine detail into the whole picture.

Where else might this begin to make sense in teaching? Well, certainly in English. One of the first things you do before teaching an extended text is to teach students the plot. If you are teaching pupils The Merchant of Venice then you teach students about the pairs of characters, the love interests, the racism, the basic plot around the borrowing of 300 ducats by Bassanio, through his friend Antonio, to pretend to be rich in order to woo Portia (Bassanio really doesn’t come out well in this play), the cross dressing and even the idea that Portia is played by a man who cross dresses back into a man to play the young lawyer. It’s a fiendish plot and one of Shakespeare’s more simple plays! But we absolutely teach the plot first using name tags, bags of gold and solid drama pedagogy. And all those items are not only more than four to seven items but the pupils won’t remember much of it…in great detail. However, as we go through the play and its key scenes, so we will add detail and so that grand plot will come together just like the skeleton with the 206 bones. Once that has happened, then our pupil can zoom in and out of the play examining themes, character evolution and key quotations at ease as they consider the play through the lens of a question. They can recall the large plot of more than 4-7 items and also add detail to each subsection of the plot. This idea is reinforced by one the earlier ideas about resolution rather than slots from this paper by Frick (1988) which found the parsing of knowledge (separating knowledge into items) did not happen as the knowledge entered working memory, but at the point of recall, something he calls the ‘process of recovery’.

Working memory is a finite resource. But rather than see it as restricted to 4-7 parsed slots, begin to see that depending on context and the pupil’s individual strength of working memory, resolution is that which is affected rather than number of items. And then, even further, start to think about delivering something that won’t be recalled immediately in fine detail. Deliver a whole worked example in its entirety first and then go through each section of the worked example in detail.

One issue for us all is why the CCF eschews this contrasting idea of resolution from its literature review. You can still overload working memory, but you are only overloading its ability to create memories with fine resolution. And then Frick would say the parsing happens on the recall, not on the initial learning so there’s further debate there.

There is clearly a place for lower resolution memories in teaching in terms of bigger and more complex sets of data. By adopting the idea of resolution you begin to work with magnitudinal ideas. You can move along the magnitudinal spectrum and allow pupils to zoom in and out of schemata seeing both overarching and complex pictures whilst they are also able to focus and recall fine parsed detail. It’s an important refinement to the idea of working memory and cognitive load and we have to, as teachers, consider how that affects the way we approach our teaching.

Copyright © Dr James Shea and Dr Gareth Bates 2023

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Dr James Shea https://twitter.com/englishspecial

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Posted on by Dr James Shea · 1 Comment

Internal School Avoidance- how pupils avoid paying attention

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In the classroom, a pupil uses attentional control to learn. They suppress their other thoughts and instead focus wholly on the thing being taught. Well, that’s the idea. Unless they don’t. And we’ve all been there. Sitting up, listening, tracking the speaker, nodding and wholly zoned out. We are as guilty as any other when it comes to not offering attentional control from time to time.

There are a variety of reasons pupils do this. Sometimes they are quite open about why they are doing it. ‘I’m tired.’, ‘It’s boring’, ‘I already know this’, ‘It’s too hard’ and ‘It’s too hot’ are all things pupils say to us. Sometimes they are discreet about it. They are are slow to get ready, slow to write, only answer questions in simple terms, make little effort in their spoken or written work. They are not paying attentional control. They can do it habitually in every lesson, or only in some lessons and indeed sometimes only for one teacher. There is a ceiling to how much behaviourist approaches to learning can improve this situation. But an issue it is. Because every educator you know will say they see this lack of attentional control on a regular basis from pre-school to post grad. And I want to personally honest here. I’ve been in meetings and talks where I am sitting up, listening, tracking the speaker, nodding and I’m actually away with the fairies. Sometimes my thoughts just go off on tangents. Sometimes I have other things on my mind. I’ve written before about anxiety and the way this affects our working memory and capacity to provide attentional control. If it affects us as adults it most certainly affects children. I have to be clear. I’m not focused on children who are trying hard to provide attentional control despite challenges. Those who have anxiety or other needs which are impairing their attentional control are not the subject of this blog. It is the many who could, but don’t. They waste time, they work slowly, they participate less than they could and they don’t focus their executive function on the learning happening.

A child not paying attention, avoids offering the attentional control required to make learning happen effectively. That avoidance can be space physical (a pre-school child might not want to move from one zone to the carpet zone), it can be subtle physical avoidance (a child might make getting ready to work take so long that the “Do Now” activity time has finished before they started) or it can be mental avoidance (they sit quietly, look at the teacher, track, nod, but make no effort to focus on the actual learning). One of these three things happen in pretty much every lesson I’ve ever observed. It’s incredibly common. However, I want to focus on attentional control avoidance because this countermands everything we are doing as teachers.

Using Baddeley’s model of working memory, the central executive brings together the visuospatial sketchpad and the phonological loop to form memories. However, this happens at a variety of levels. Imagine I am walking down the street thinking to myself. I don’t pay that much attention to the environment around me or the familiar route I am taking. However, I then get to a point where the road is closed blocking my normal route. I then need to find an alternative route in order to continue, it is the central executive that enables me to do this as it ‘switches’ attentional control. Pupils are doing similar things in lessons. They can glide through activities and teacher talk on autopilot – seemingly there, but not paying the level of attention required for strong learning.

We’ve all heard about the new focus on internal truancy. First there was external truancy where pupils skipped schools in unauthorised absences. Then we noticed they were dawdling between lessons, going to the toilets a lot – internal truancy, so we’ve cracked down on that and had numerous debates about locking toilets. But there is a swathe of pupils habitually and frequently not paying attention that are flying under the radar. They use classic avoidance strategies to appear compliant whilst keeping their learning minimised through not paying attention. It is a form of truancy that is so subtle, but it has a similar impact on lost learning. Why are we not cracking down on this as much as external or internal truancy? Because it’s really hard to force someone to pay attention if they don’t want to. It’s why a good teaching assistant is so helpful in a classroom. They can get through to the passive child and help them start to pay attention again. If they pay attention for the child that is not so good as a teaching assistant should not be doing the teaching. But they can intervene to help the child pay attention again.

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And are there answers? Well, yes.

I’ve written before about episodic curiosity. When a pupil wants to learn in your subject they apply maximum attentional control to every aspect of learning in your lesson. It absolutely supercharges their progress. You could take the same child and move them to a different teacher or school and they would still be making awesome progress due to that level of attentional control. I recall a pupil bumping along at sub 4 for all of Year 10 and at the end of the academic year they told me they wanted to be a solicitor and asked what English grade they’d need to make this dream happen (needless to say, my answer was a shock to them). What happened next astonished me. They started paying attentional control to every aspect of every English lesson. They asked for and completed extra work. In the exam they scored an 8. I can’t take credit for that learning. But it taught me about the power of having a pupil motivated to learn in my subject. It taught me about epistemic curiosity and how important that is. When I really want to learn something, I really pay attention and the same is true for pupils!

We seem to be focused on cleaning up the cognitive landscape to remove extraneous load. We are using knowledge of studies from psychology to make remembering easier. We are very focused, rightly so, on behaviour. And then we watch child after child, in lesson after lesson, not pay attentional control. And we, as teachers, see it very often. There is a ceiling to CLT in lessons and a ceiling to behaviourist approaches. Those ceilings are that a child can simply withdraw or mute their attentional control. They might as well have 60 days a year off school instead, because that is the impact on the learning of some of those with the most reduced attentional control. There are lots of answers already out there and each pupil is unique and their personal solution might be complex. But until we start focusing on this area, then we are consigning a huge amount of learning hours to the dustbin of internal school avoidance.