John sweller cognitive load theory summrrize by halima

INTRODUCTION

Cognitive load theory by John sweller

In cognitive psychology, cognitive load refers to the total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory. Cognitive load theory was developed out of the study of problem solving by John Sweller in the late 1980s Sweller argued that instructional design can be used to reduce cognitive load in learners. Cognitive load theory differentiates cognitive load into three types: intrinsic, extraneous, and germane.

TASK

Intrinsic cognitive load is the effort associated with a specific topic. Extraneous cognitive load refers to the way information or tasks are presented to a learner. And, germane cognitive load refers to the work put into creating a permanent store of knowledge, or a schema.

Researchers Pass and Van Merriënboer developed a way to measure perceived mental effort which is indicative of cognitive load. Task-invoked papillary response is a reliable and sensitive measurement of cognitive load that is directly related to working memory. Heavy cognitive load can have negative effects on task completion, and it is important to note that the experience of cognitive load is not the same in everyone. The elderly, students, and children experience different, and more often higher, amounts of cognitive load.

High cognitive load in the elderly has been shown to affect their center of balance. With increased distractions and cell phone use students are more prone to experiencing high cognitive load which can reduce academic success. Children have less general knowledge than adults which increase their cognitive load recent theoretical advances include the incorporation of embodied cognition in order to predict the cognitive load resulting from embodied interactions.[6]

PROCCESS

Theory

"Cognitive load theory has been designed to provide guidelines intended to assist in the presentation of information in a manner that encourages learner activities that optimize intellectual performance".[7] Sweller's theory employs aspects of information processing theory to emphasize the inherent limitations of concurrent working memory load on learning during instruction. It makes use of the schema as primary unit of analysis for the design of instructional materials.

History

The history of cognitive load theory can be traced to the beginning of Cognitive Science in the 1950s and the work of G.A. Miller. In his classic paper,Miller was perhaps the first to suggest our working memory capacity has inherent limits. His experimental results suggested that humans are generally able to hold only seven plus or minus two units of information in short-term memory. And in the early 1970s Simon and Chase were the first to use the term "chunk" to describe how people might organize information in short-term memory. This chunking of memory components has also been described as schema construction.

In the late 1980s John Sweller developed cognitive load theory (CLT) while studying problem solving. Studying learners as they solved problems, he and his associates found that learners often use a problem solving strategy called means-ends analysis. He suggests problem solving by means-ends analysis requires a relatively large amount of cognitive processing capacity, which may not be devoted to schema construction. Sweller suggests that instructional designers should prevent this unnecessary cognitive load by designing instructional materials which do not involve problem solving. Examples of alternative instructional materials include what are known as worked-examples and goal-free problems.

In the 1990s, cognitive load theory was applied in several contexts. The empirical results from these studies led to the demonstration of several learning effects: the completion-problem effect; modality effect; split-attention effect worked-example effect; and expertise reversal effect.

EVALUATION

Human mental workload has gained importance, in the last few decades, as a fundamental design concept in human-computer interaction, education and other fields. For people interacting with interfaces, computers and technological devices in general, the construct plays an important role. At a low level, while processing information, often people feel annoyed and frustrated; at higher level, mental workload is critical and dangerous as it leads to confusion, it decreases the performance of information processing and it increases the chances of errors and mistakes. It is extensively documented that either mental overload or under load negatively affect performance. Hence, designers and practitioners who are ultimately interested in system or human performance need answers about operator workload at all stages of system design and operation. At an early system design phase, designers require some explicit model to predict the mental workload imposed by their technologies on end-users so that alternative system designs can be evaluated. However, human mental workload is a multifaceted and complex construct mainly applied in cognitive sciences. A plethora of ad-hoc definitions can be found in the literature. Generally, it is not an elementary property, rather it emerges from the interaction between the requirements of a task, the circumstances under which it is performed and the skills, behaviours and perceptions of the operator. Although measuring mental workload has advantages in interaction and interface design, its formalization as an operational and computational construct has not sufficiently been addressed. Many researchers agree that too many ad-hoc models are present in the literature and that they are applied subjectively by mental workload designers thereby limiting their application in different contexts and making comparison across different models difficult

.CONCLUSION

The main contribution of this thesis is the introduction of a methodology, developed as a formal modular framework, to represent mental workload as a defensible computational concept and to assess it as a numerical usable index. The research contributes to the body of knowledge by providing a modular framework built upon defensible reasoning and formalized using argumentation theory in which workload can be measured, analyzed, explained and applied in different contexts. The framework follows the Popperian test of falsifiability, this being also flexible and replicable. The preliminary solution proposed was designed for those scholars interested in engaging in the multi-disciplinary domain of mental workload and it is aimed at increasing its understanding and use. A further goal is to offer a new perspective on the formalization of mental workload, encouraging further research on its representation, assessment and application in more general fields such as human–computer interaction, education, and educational psychology.