Managing Cognitive Load While Teaching Human Gait to Novice Health Care Science Students

Abstract

Introduction. Human working memory becomes increasingly prone to errors as learning tasks become more complex. This is of particular importance to those working with instruction that requires the novice learner to simultaneously maintain and manipulate many elements of information for learning with understanding to occur. Under such circumstances, cognitive load theory provides support for the use of instructional principles that improve learning of complex cognitive tasks by matching instruction and instructional processes with the limitations of human memory. The purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of instructional materials designed to reduce cognitive load and improve instructional effectiveness in the teaching of introductory human gait to novice health care science students using instructional sequencing principles under authentic classroom conditions.Subjects. Participants included 54 first-year Doctor of Physical Therapy and Master of Occupational Therapy students from a large Midwestern university that were recruited on a voluntary basis and were randomly assigned to either a modified instruction group or a control group.Methods. Aspects of traditional teaching methods and materials expected to impose high levels of cognitive load were modified using instructional sequencing principles designed to reduce cognitive load. The traditional and modified instructional formats were compared under authentic classroom conditions using delayed written examination scores, ratings of cognitive load, and task completion times.Results. Multivariate analysis of variance yielded an overall significant difference between the control and modified instruction group (Pillai's Trace: F [4, 49] = 10.529, P Discussion and Conclusion. Results from this study suggest that instructional designers, such as those teaching introductory human gait to novice physical therapy and occupational therapy students, can increase instructional effectiveness with the use of an isolated-to-interacting elements approach designed to reduce intrinsic cognitive load under certain conditions.Key Words: Student learning, Teaching methods, Learning theory, Cognitive load, Instructional design, and Working memory.INTRODUCTIONHuman cognitive architecture refers to the manner in which information is processed in working memory, organized into meaningful units or chunks of interrelated information called schemata, and transferred to long-term memory.1 Human cognitive architecture has significant implications for information processing, including the processes of learning. Two primary components of this cognitive architecture are the conscious information processing capabilities of working memory and the organized knowledge structures provided by long-term memory.2,3 The conceptual relationship between information from the environment, long-term memory, and working memory is depicted in Figure 1.Working memory, while able to allow a human being to manage a complex array of cognitive tasks, presents with an information processing bottleneck in that it can only maintain about 7 ±2 elements of information at a time and may only hold information active for 2-3 seconds without rehearsal.47 In practical terms, human working memory becomes increasingly prone to errors as learning tasks become more complex, such as when the novice learner is given instruction that requires him or her to simultaneously maintain and manipulate multiple elements of information for learning to occur.8In contrast, long-term memory can effectively store vast amounts of information, including content knowledge, skills, and strategies on a relatively permanent basis. …