Cognitive Load

Simple is not always better. Sometimes simple is just emptier.

When somebody tries to teach you something difficult, there is a fashionable response to your confusion, which is to say that the material should have been simpler. Dumb it down. Strip out the complexity. Make it easier to take in. This sounds kind, and sometimes it is right, but often it turns out to be a misreading of what was actually going wrong. The struggle you were feeling was not always with the difficulty of the idea itself. A lot of the time it was with the way the idea was presented. Clunky slides. Jargon dropped in without warning. Too many things on the screen at once. A voice over that does not match what you are looking at. These are not features of a complex topic. They are features of bad design, and they burn up the mental space you needed to actually engage with the topic.

A psychologist named John Sweller spent his career showing that your working memory, the bit of your mind that holds whatever you are currently thinking about, is painfully small and easily overwhelmed. But the overwhelm has two very different sources. There is the real difficulty of the thing you are learning, which is unavoidable if the thing is genuinely worth learning, and there is the avoidable difficulty that comes from how the material is packaged. The right response is not to strip away the first. It is to stop wasting the second. Real simplification is not making the idea smaller. It is getting the noise out of the way so the idea has somewhere to land. When was the last time you struggled with something and realised the problem was not the thing itself but how it had been explained to you?

Last week we said clear design protects the room your mind needs to work in. This week we look at what else, besides attention, actually decides whether a learner gets better.