Cognitive Load During Problem Solving

Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257-285.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1988

Volume

12

Issue

2

Pages

257-285

DOI

10.1207/s15516709cog1202_4

DOI registrant

Wiley

Link

https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1202_4

Cited from

art_aesthetics, engineering_design, psychology

Cited by

5 citations across 5 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Accidental Vs Essential Complexity
  • In education, the conceptual difficulty of calculus is essential while poor sequencing and notation overhead is accidental, and curriculum reform attacks the latter.

    This sourceFounds cognitive load theory, separating intrinsic load (the irreducible difficulty of the material) from extraneous load (imposed by how it is presented) — the education-domain form of the essential/accidental partition that curriculum and notation reform target.

• Chunking
  • T2: Chunk Granularity Mismatch.
• Minimalism
  • … sculpture as catalogued by Meyer), systematic design philosophy (Maeda's design principles, Kondo's organizing method, Norman's human-centered design, Rams's ten principles), and empirical research in usability and cognition (cognitive load theory, signal-to-noise optimization; Sweller's cognitive load research

Domain-specific

• Cognitive Load
  • Cognitive load theory, grounded in Sweller 1988, decomposes demand into three components:

    Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract

    Sweller 1988's abstract supports problem solving draining capacity needed for schema acquisition, but states no three-component decomposition of load.

    “It is suggested that a major reason for the ineffectiveness of problem solving as a learning device, is that the cognitive processes required by the two activities overlap insufficiently”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

Mechanisms

• Curriculum Units
  • Sizing to working-memory limits is what keeps a unit masterable in one effort rather than overwhelming.

    This sourceShows that demanding problem-solving processes consume limited cognitive capacity that would otherwise be available for learning.

Verification

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Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 1 of 5 citations: 1 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.

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