The Checklist That Didn’t Exist: A Field Guide to Cutting Extraneous Load — from learningguild.com by Cally Mervine Kiser
If the content is fine, what else could be getting in the way?
The answer, it turns out, has been sitting in educational psychology research for decades. Working memory is finite. When learners engage with training, they are managing three competing cognitive demands simultaneously:
- The complexity of the subject matter
- The effortful processing that builds understanding
- The mental effort generated by how the content is presented, independent of the content itself
That third one is called extraneous cognitive load, and it is the one we almost never explicitly design against. We design for accuracy. We design for alignment. We design for engagement, or at least what we hope will feel like engagement. We almost never sit down and ask, “How much unnecessary mental effort is this design generating, and how do we reduce it?”