Ep #24.2 | Unpacking the Mind: A talk with John Sweller

Hello everyone, Laura here and welcome to the second part of our interview with Professor John Swaller. Today, we will once again join Michelle as she discusses a variety of topics with Professor Swaller, including cognitive science, evolutionary educational psychology and human cognitive architecture. Let's dive back in as the two consider proposed connections between educational technology and cognitive load theory like the Transient Information Effect. Back to Jimi Shell. You already mentioned the paper I would like to refer to from 2019 called Cognitive Load Theory and Education Technology. We have published, we are wondering now how cognitive load and instructional design but more in detail educational technology are related how they can be related. Let me begin by speaking in very general terms. The major point, the major rationale of educational technology is to assist people to learn. That's its function. That's why you're studying educational technology. Cognitive load theory has exactly the same role. It's there to assist us in teaching students and assist students to learn. Every aspect of educational technology interacts with cognitive load theory. In other words, if you look at the large number of cognitive load effects, which are the instructional effects, I don't think there's a single one of them is not relevant directly in one way or another to educational technology. That's the first point I'd like to make. But there's a second point. There'll be more specific. Some of the effects are far more important to educational technology than others. Let me concentrate for a minute on a fairly new effect. I think it's about 10 years ago or so that we discovered it. It's called the Transient Information Effect. Some information can be presented in a way that it's permanent. If I show you a diagram or a picture or writing, it's permanent. When it's put in front of you, it doesn't go away. Other information is transient. What we're doing now is transient. Whenever I say something, within a few seconds, it's gone and we go on to the next thing that I'm talking about. It doesn't stay there permanently. Speech is transient. Writing is permanent. We invented writing precisely because it's permanent. But as I'm aware, there's probably no other reason why we invented writing to get around that transient nature of speech. Animations are transient. One of the advantages of educational technology is you can do a lot of things which you couldn't do without educational technology or you couldn't do easily. The old educational technology was printed paper. That was a good technology, but there's lots of things you can't do. We can't present speech on printed paper. We can present a representation of the speech by the writing. We can't present animations on the printed paper. We can using technology. But that's a danger. We need to be careful that we don't present things using educational technology simply because we can. Because some of the things we can present with educational technology take us backwards instead of forwards. The ability to present material in spoken form much more easily using technology. Or in animated form much more easily using technology. In fact, you can't do it without technology other than by doing it personally. That can have negative effects. Go back to that limited working memory. Limited in capacity, limited in duration. Anything you're given in working memory which you can't practice disappears after about 20 seconds. So you're presenting information in transient form. After 20 seconds everything that was previously presented unless it's something that's fairly familiar to you, it's gone. You can't remember those details. If it's novel, it goes. You need to be very careful when you present transient information. And there's a lot of educational technology out there which when I look at it I can see. They are presenting the information in animated form or in spoken form simply because they can. Not because it's actually improves learning. We need to keep in mind the transient information effect. It's an effect which is directly relevant to the presentation of educational technology. But I repeat what I said right at the beginning, there are no cognitive load effects which are not relevant to educational technology because the aim of educational technology is exactly the same as the aim of cognitive load theory to improve learning. So would you say it depends in let's say learning on paper just equally on how it is with learning with technology and how you present the things if it is a positive or cognitive load or if it's negative or cognitive load. Yes, exactly. You need to take into account the cognitive load of presenting the information and some information. I mean, if you present somebody with a complex diagram where they have to look at it over here and then look over here and work out the relations between things, you don't want to present that in animated form. You can present it in animated form in many cases. But if you do, it makes it worse. Not better if it's complex, high in element of activity, difficult to understand. You know the way you learn yourself. You want to just look at it and work out, okay, this relates to this and this is how this goes over here. You don't want that animated. Sometimes you do, but take care of that working memory load. It's critical. Keep in mind that one of the problems is if you're the instructor, the reason you're the instructor is you know the information and when I say you know the information, what I'm really saying is it's low in element in interactivity for you. It's got a low intrinsic cognitive load. It's all just one single entity and you can hold it in working memory easily, effortlessly and unconsciously. But if you're a student, each one of those little elements is an individual element and you have to work out the relation between them and that can be a complex difficult task. So you need to be aware that for the same material, your cognitive load is low. The people you're directing the information to, their cognitive load is high. Depending then again on what we already have in the long term memory or not. Exactly. That's exactly. Now that we talk about a lot of what is the current state, how is it in the past, how the theory, how the whole theoretical background developed over the time, I would like to know what is your opinion about the future and the future directions of the field of cognitive science and education technology, maybe also the combination of both. How do you see that? I've been asked that question many times and I've given many answers over the years. And the one thing I've discovered over those years is I find it almost impossible to predict the directions. Let me give you two examples of that. We're constantly running experiments, those randomized control trials and we're generating data. The data is often what we expect, but sometimes it's not. When we get unexpected data, the theory changes. It's interesting when we get the data we expect, the theory becomes static. It doesn't really advance. It actually advances when we get unexpected data. And by definition, I can't predict unexpected data. So I don't know when it's coming, but if you look at the history of the various cognitive load effects, we have added evidence for the worked example effect using algebra. The sort of problems I keep referring to, A+, B=C solve for A. We gave people worked examples to study and found that they learned more than if we gave them problems to solve. Well, that was fine. So we assumed, OK, well, this shouldn't just work on algebra, it should work in a whole lot of other areas. So we went to other areas and we couldn't get the effect. And this went on for several years. Why do we get even in related areas in mathematics? Why do we get the effect in using algebra, but not get the effect using geometry? Why in the world do you not need worked examples in geometry? It's a long time to realize the way in which we present worked examples in geometry is different to the way in which we present worked examples in algebra, the traditional way of presenting them. is different. In geometry you get what we call a split attention effect. If you have a geometry theorem which is angle A, B, C equals angle X, Y, Z for such and such a reason, along with a geometry diagram, you've got to split your attention between the diagram and the statement. When you're reading the statement, you've got to remember the diagram. When you're looking at the diagram, you've got to remember the statement. That imposes a cognitive load. That led to the split attention effect. We didn't think of that beforehand. It took us a long time. That's a major effect. Same happened with the redundancy effect and a whole series of effects. Every single cognitive load effect has limits. And we don't know where those limits are. And until when we find those limits, what we tend to find is a new cognitive load effect. That's one impediment to me being able to give you a good idea of where the theory should be going. Let me give you another one. Relatively recently, about 10 to 20 years ago, we introduced evolutionary educational psychology into cognitive load theory. Now, one of the major findings of evolutionary educational psychology was made by David Geary in the United States, who distinguished between biologically primary information that we have evolved to learn and biologically secondary information that we can learn, but we haven't specifically evolved to learn. Examples of that are you learn to listen and speak German without really being taught. It just happened easily, naturally living in a normal environment, you picked up the language. We have evolved to acquire our first language. We haven't evolved to learn the read and write, and we haven't evolved to learn a second language after puberty. It's a different process. It's biologically secondary. We can learn those things, but we learn them differently. Cognitive load theory applies to biologically secondary information. Doesn't apply to biologically primary information. You can use primary information to leverage the learning of secondary information. We're very good at primary dealing with primary information, but it's a different process, and that changed cognitive load theory. Until I read David Geary's work and incorporated his work into cognitive load theory, I had no idea that there was a difference. Much of the field, when they're unaware of that distinction between biologically primary and secondary information, ignores the distinction, and people talk about, "Oh, look, we ought to learn to read and write naturally in the same way as we learn to listen and speak," and that's a disaster. It's a different way of learning. We need to be explicitly taught how to read and write. Until the rise of modern education, reading and writing was discovered thousands of years ago, until about, I don't know, 150 years ago, most people couldn't read and write. They didn't pick it up naturally. Everybody could listen and speak, couldn't read and write. It's a different process, learning that biologically secondary information. Now, these things, I didn't predict any of these things. I don't know the results of my experiments, and I don't know when somebody else comes up with a brilliant theoretical concept like the distinction between biologically primary and secondary knowledge, and suddenly the whole theory changes as a consequence. Well, when we talk about working memory, that applies to biologically secondary information. When you look at what psychologists have done with respect to working memory, they uniformly use biologically secondary information that students are not familiar with, that they haven't picked up automatically. So it only applies to the limitations of working memory, only applied to biologically secondary information, essentially. So you can see why I say, I find it hopeless attempting to predict what comes next. I'd like to, and I used to, but since none of my predictions ever came out, I'm just going to look, I've got to give this up. But I hope I've managed to explain why it's so difficult to make these predictions. It's the same with any scientific area, same with educational technology. If you had to predict what is the educational technology that people are going to be using in 10, 15, 20 years, you could make a guess, but whether you're really able to do it is something else. Yeah, that's true. That's true. I have one last question. We now talk already about future directions, which are like said, hard to predict. No one knows what is coming. I would like to ask you then, do you have any advice for future instructional designers like me, for example, or also, which are a huge part of our audience, who are either already instructional designers or future instructional designers? Look, the major advice I always give to instructional designers, because the instructional designers are one of my primary audiences, make sure you're familiar with human cognitive architecture. It's absolutely critical. And in a way, I would like instructional design courses to put more emphasis on human cognitive architecture, but whether the course you're in does or doesn't do that, you personally should make sure you're familiar with human cognitive architecture. It's the basis of everything we do in this area. It's really important. Make sure that you know the relation between working memory and long-term memory. Make sure you know the relation between biologically primary and biologically secondary information. Make sure you know that we can obtain information in two different ways, which I haven't talked about. You can obtain information either by working it out yourself, problem solving, or you can obtain it pretty much as you're doing now by getting information from another person. And both of those techniques are biologically primary. Humans have evolved to obtain information from each other. Be wary of people who say, "Look, the natural way of obtaining information is to work it out for yourself." It is a natural way. Getting it from other people is a far far better way. Humans are humans because we're able to do exactly what we're doing now, which is communicate with each other. It probably is the major reason for dominance of humans amongst mammalian species. Disability to communicate with each other, we're really, really good at it in a way that no other species is. And it's important that we understand that's part of human cognitive architecture obtaining information from each other. Okay. Well, thank you very much for your opinion, for your advice, also for me, for all the others. And also for all the information you gave us today. And thank you for your very, very good questions. This has been a great interview. And you've made it a great interview. So thank you very much. Thank you. This has certainly been a very interesting series of episodes covering topics related to the cognitive load theory, its relationship with educational technology, and its relevant applications in the classroom. To find more about these and other edutek-related topics, make sure you also listen to our next episodes. Remember that you can follow the conversation about these and other topics on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. Thanks again, Professor John Swallow and Michelle, and thanks to you, the audience, for joining us. Until the next time, in edutek-expe.