Cognitive Load Theory

Imagine you’re in the first class of the semester, excited to learn something new. But unfortunately, as soon as your professor begins lecturing, you question if this is a course you can bear for another twelve weeks—not due to your lack of passion for the material, but how the material is being presented. The slides are full of text, without color or images. Your professor is rambling about something in her personal life. And your classmate is on his iPad watching something that has absolutely nothing to do with the class.

This all-too-familiar situation illustrates just one way that cognitive load theory is apparent in educational settings. Cognitive load theory (CLT) suggests that there are three types of cognitive loads we process when engaged in learning something new: 

1. Intrinsic cognitive load: How easy or difficult the content presented inherently is to learn, which stays relatively constant. In our example, this would be the material presented in the first lecture of your new course.
2. Extraneous cognitive load: How easy or difficult it is to learn the content considering the environment in which it is presented, which varies. In our example, this would be your teacher being off-topic, the text-heavy slides, and your classmate on his iPad. 
3. Germane cognitive load: The mental resources required to fit the material into schemas, our cognitive frameworks for organizing and interpreting information. In our example, this would be how challenging it felt to sort and store the new knowledge from the lecture in your head, considering its unfocused presentation.

John Sweller, the educational psychologist who proposed CLT, originally suggested that the total cognitive load is the sum of intrinsic, extraneous, and germane loads when a learner is engaged in learning.⁵ He believed that the overarching goal of CLT is to lessen the amount of extraneous load by changing the way instructions are presented when learning occurs. 

For example, in that lecture hall, let’s say the intrinsic load wasn’t too much since the material was an inherently easier topic for the introduction class. However, the extraneous and germane loads were quite overbearing—the delivery was clouded by many different distractions (extraneous) which made it awfully difficult to apply this information to your previous knowledge (germane), despite it seeming simple at face value. According to Sweller, this would mean that the overall cognitive load of the lecture was quite heavy.

It’s important to note that the three types of cognitive loads are rooted in different stages of our memory system:²

• First, our sensory memory helps us pick up initial sensory information. It filters out unnecessary details in our environments and then communicates the important ones to our working memory for further processing.
• Our working memory is responsible for processing intrinsic and extraneous cognitive loads. Working memory has traditionally been theorized to be capable of processing between five to nine “bits” of information at a time—which today has been updated to be just four.^3,4 When our working memory is active, our brain then decides what to throw away and what to pass along to long-term memory. 
• Finally, our long-term memory handles germane cognitive loads by sorting the information it wants to keep into schemas to help organize and apply the information later on. Schemas have a “use it or lose it” element, where the more a schema is grown and recalled, the easier it is to refer to it in the future.

Although so far we have focused on a hypothetical college student experiencing CLT, it is key to apply this theory to other demographics of learners as well. While it may be intuitive to then think of other age groups—such as children who still have developing working memories, or the elderly who have declining memory capacities—other demographic features like socioeconomic status are relevant to CLT too. Some research has found that those with less financial resources may experience impairments in decision-making, perhaps as poverty places higher cognitive loads on them, especially extraneous loads that might lessen their ability to focus.⁶