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My knee-jerk instinct was to read this paper and take it as truth in the sense that it's "debunking a popular belief," much like the "types of learning" belief.

My knee-jerk instinct was to read this paper and take it as truth in the sense that it's "debunking a popular belief," much like the "types of learning" belief. However, this paper is 12 years old, so I was curious about whether there had been any responses. I found this blog entry, which seems to be relatively well-researched: http://bdld.blogspot.com/2011/06/five-years-later-review-of-kirschner.html http://bdld.blogspot.com/2011/06/five-years-later-review-of-... Especially of note is the section that states: > The paper relies heavily on Cognitive Load Theory, yet we have to realize that it is still a theory rather than a law. The author also quotes Joel Michael to unpack some of the difficulties in studying educational methodology in general, which gave me some perspective. It's something I've thought about a lot since many Japanese people mourn the "yutori kyoiku" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutori_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutori_education) philosophy and I would often wonder which generations of students were a result of that system and which were simply molded by other social pressures.

joe_the_user 8y ago
I felt the paper's reliance on cognitive load theory was a bit problematic. I'd have a different theory about the problems of "experiential learning" in a class room setting. I've taught myself a lot on my own and so the idea of exploratory learning always appealed to me. But all the experiential learning circumstances I've been exposed to just felt like tricks. The teacher has something in mind they want the student to learn, doesn't tell them exactly what that is, and still expects them to learn to exactly that thing, rather than some other things that the circumstances presented might teach the student. Actually, this relates to a lot of contexts. One example is those terrible job interviews where the interviewer says something vague like "tell me about yourself" but expects to learn specific thing. Another is Role Playing Games (I'm an avid player of these). There's a classic problem where a dungeon master expects their players to explore a city and make a specific discovery with the clues given. That's typically much harder than the DM imagines and experienced DMs learn to just set-up situation and let whatever the players discover be what happens. In general, I think a teacher or authority should say what they want in a learning or examination process, if they want a specific thing. Because if they don't say that, their idea of what a person would "naturally" discover through exploration might actually be wrong, indeed given the natural variation in people's cognition, it probably is going to be wrong some large portion of the time for many students.
- singingfish 8y ago
  Cognitive load theory is fairly straightforward. People are able to handle 7±2 items in their working (short-term) memory at any one time. This means reliably 5 items. Subtract one for standard normal distractors. Thus students should not be expected to have to juggle more than 4 items at any one time. The problem here is that what an item is for a student is different than what an item is for an instructor. This is due to "chunking" (technical term from psychology). For the instructor, discovering what an item is especially difficult, as they may not be aware of what they had to learn to know what they now know. Personally I'm all for minimal guidance, but it has to be closely aligned to learning outcomes, and the instructor needs to understand what an item means for the student, if they are to have a hope of introducing less than four things at a time. CLT is a solid theory with an extremely good basis. However understanding how to apply it is hard given the knowledge difference between student and instructor.
  - edtechdev 8y ago
    Cognitive load theory is unfalsifiable and has numerous conceptual and methodological problems: https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-theory-failure/ https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-th...

joe_the_user 8y ago

I felt the paper's reliance on cognitive load theory was a bit problematic. I'd have a different theory about the problems of "experiential learning" in a class room setting. I've taught myself a lot on my own and so the idea of exploratory learning always appealed to me. But all the experiential learning circumstances I've been exposed to just felt like tricks. The teacher has something in mind they want the student to learn, doesn't tell them exactly what that is, and still expects them to learn to exactly that thing, rather than some other things that the circumstances presented might teach the student. Actually, this relates to a lot of contexts. One example is those terrible job interviews where the interviewer says something vague like "tell me about yourself" but expects to learn specific thing. Another is Role Playing Games (I'm an avid player of these). There's a classic problem where a dungeon master expects their players to explore a city and make a specific discovery with the clues given. That's typically much harder than the DM imagines and experienced DMs learn to just set-up situation and let whatever the players discover be what happens. In general, I think a teacher or authority should say what they want in a learning or examination process, if they want a specific thing. Because if they don't say that, their idea of what a person would "naturally" discover through exploration might actually be wrong, indeed given the natural variation in people's cognition, it probably is going to be wrong some large portion of the time for many students.

singingfish 8y ago
Cognitive load theory is fairly straightforward. People are able to handle 7±2 items in their working (short-term) memory at any one time. This means reliably 5 items. Subtract one for standard normal distractors. Thus students should not be expected to have to juggle more than 4 items at any one time. The problem here is that what an item is for a student is different than what an item is for an instructor. This is due to "chunking" (technical term from psychology). For the instructor, discovering what an item is especially difficult, as they may not be aware of what they had to learn to know what they now know. Personally I'm all for minimal guidance, but it has to be closely aligned to learning outcomes, and the instructor needs to understand what an item means for the student, if they are to have a hope of introducing less than four things at a time. CLT is a solid theory with an extremely good basis. However understanding how to apply it is hard given the knowledge difference between student and instructor.
- edtechdev 8y ago
  Cognitive load theory is unfalsifiable and has numerous conceptual and methodological problems: https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-theory-failure/ https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-th...