- > Cognitive load theory is the idea, first published by Sweller in 1988, that instructional design should focus on not overloading a learner’s mental effort when designing instruction. “Learning is hampered when working memory capacity is exceeded in a learning task” (de Jong, 2009).
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- > Germane cognitive load – This is the on-task mental ‘load’ or activity during learning. This can and should be influenced by the instructional designer. If one defines learning as schema acquisition and building, the ‘germane’ cognitive load is that which contributes to such schema acquisition, and the ‘extraneous’ cognitive load is that which does not.
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- > As soon as I first read about germane cognitive load (good) in 1998 vs. extraneous cognitive load (bad), cognitive load theory became unfalsifiable in my opinion. You can justify any experimental result after the fact by labeling stuff that hurts performance as extraneous and the stuff that didn’t as germane.
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- > Can’t distinguish between germane and extraneous cognitive load. Related to the above – one can’t objectively and before the fact tell whether something will be germane or not. Sometimes something that induces extraneous load may also induce germane load and vice versa. The type of load is highly dependent on learner characteristics and learning objectives (Moreno, 2009).
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- > So is cognitive load theory a failure or wrong? Is that important? Like I said, the question is a joke. From one perspective Newton’s laws are wrong and were superseded by Einstein’s theories, but of course Newton’s laws are still quite useful and correct enough for everyday scenarios. The more important question is whether a theory is useful, or is there a better, more useful theory.
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- > I believe an area of future interest should be in exploring how post-cognitive theories may provide more useful explanations for some of the phenomena uncovered by cognitive load theory research. Kaptelinin and Nardi describe some post-cognitive theories in chapter 9 of their book Acting with Technology. Unfortunately, chapter 9 was taken down from the First Monday site for some reason. But the four theories they compare include activity theory, phenomenology, distributed cognition, and actor network theory.
