Understanding cognitive load theory will help us better understand the limits of our brains when it comes to learning tasks. By applying this theory, we will be more likely to recognize when a task is cognitively demanding, assess whether that demand is reasonable, and consider ways to restructure the task to enhance our learning, rather than having our cognitive limits reached, resulting in very little learning.
Read Sources of Cognitive Load by learningscientists.org
Read Factors Of Effective Note-Taking: Application Of Cognitive Load Theory by learningscientists.org
Notice how in the note-taking article, it is essential to consider context when deciding what kind of note-taking to do. The advice to “take notes by hand on paper” is not actually backed by all research studies. Instead, we should take into account the cognitive demands of the note-taking task and consider the course itself. Is the lecture very fast-paced, but also recorded? Perhaps it would be better to take minimal notes live and plan to revisit the content by watching the lecture recording, where you can pause as needed to create more comprehensive notes, which also then gives you spaced repetition of the content.
Finally, we can use the framework of intrinsic, extraneous, and germane cognitive load to also help us judge whether help is germane to a learning objective. If that help is part of the extraneous load, it is less likely to be germane compared to the intrinsic load. This identification can then lead us to find ways to reduce that extraneous load by modifying our environment, leveraging tools (including AI), and seeking assistance from others.
Final note: Germane load used to be considered its own category next to intrinsic and extraneous. However, more recent work has shifted germane load’s definition to be the ratio between intrinsic and extraneous. So be careful in what resources you use because more general media have not yet adopted this shift, and the training data of most AI has a lot more data with the old definition than the new one. Case in point, if I ask DukeGPT to define it, and it gives me the old germane load definition. When I direct ChatGPT to check the internet when defining and providing citations (internet search is not a DukeGPT feature yet), it also uses the old definition, but then adds recent developments and caveats that do mention the new definition. In this class, we use the new definition.
To make things clearer, this will be the last time we use the phrase “germane load” in the class. From now on, we refer to it as “germaneness” to make it clear that it is not a kind of load.
