How do you react when you see a very complex diagram or a screen of dense text? Are you motivated to work through it? Or do you groan and turn away if it becomes too difficult? Processing Fluency If … [Read more...]
Long-Term Memory: A User’s Guide
When you're designing learning experiences, long-term memory is the ultimate destination. It's the promised land—where you want newly learned skills and content to integrate with a person's network of … [Read more...]
Designing Learning for Mental Models
Did you have trouble the first time you tried to start a keyless car? Or perhaps the first time you took a panoramic picture? According to a well-known theory, these tasks were difficult because you … [Read more...]
How To Write Better Analogies For Learning
Analogies are a key component of human thinking and understanding. They've stimulated great feats of problem-solving and discovery. They are also a classic way to foster learning by applying prior … [Read more...]
The Power of Retrieval Practice For Learning
An Instructional Strategy for Long-term Retention
This article has been updated and republished with new content. In a culture that requires shortcuts to improving performance—microlearning, performance support and getting quick answers from … [Read more...]
8 Principles on Cognitive Load and Collaborative Learning
Collaborative learning—when people work together in small groups to help each other learn—is considered an effective instructional approach. But research shows that the benefits of collaborative … [Read more...]
Can you read the minds of your learners?
An updated look at schemas and learning
During a presentation I gave several years ago, an audience member commented that he teaches older adults how to use software programs. "When these adult students don't understand a concept, they are … [Read more...]
What is cognitive load?
As far as I can tell, working memory (WM), the aspect of our brain that manipulates information in the moment, affects most everything we do in terms of learning. Working memory can only hold around … [Read more...]
Metacognition And Learning: Strategies For Instructional Design
Do you know how to learn? Many people don't. Specifically, they don't know how to look inward to examine how they learn and to judge which methods are effective. That's where metacognitive … [Read more...]
Watch Out For Those Seductive Details
In order to make courses engaging, particularly compliance-type courses, you may add content that is tangentially related to the topic in the hopes of motivating or entertaining the audience. These … [Read more...]
Strategies For Tacit Knowledge Transfer
Tacit Knowledge Is Difficult to Articulate Can you explain all of the skills necessary to be an effective leader? What about the skills needed to create an innovative design? There are aspects of … [Read more...]
Six Strategies You May Not Be Using To Reduce Cognitive Load
In a complex world, it's easy to get overwhelmed by a deluge of complex information. This shouldn't be surprising, as working memory (our mental work space), has a limited capacity for processing … [Read more...]