Cleaning out the Cognitive Clutter

The holidays are meant to be the the best time of the year.

However, the holidays can be extremely stressful for many of our students and families. Kate Crowe is guest blogger this week with some tips on how to clean out the cognitive clutter.

Each of us has a mental workspace where we process and manipulate information.  This workspace is called working memory.  Your workspace can only hold so many chunks of information at one time (probably about 5-9), and it doesn’t hold on to those chunks for very long.

Most of us have plenty of “stuff” in our workspace - planning, decision-making, cognition, emotion, and behavior can all exist there.  The amount of stuff in your workspace is called your cognitive load, which is the total amount of mental effort

Most of us have plenty of “stuff” in our workspace - planning, decision-making, cognition, emotion, and behavior can all exist there.  The amount of stuff in your workspace is called your cognitive load, which is the total amount of mental effort being used by your working memory.  While a “typical” student has plenty of cognitive load to try to manage, students from poverty frequently have more than the average number of pieces of information trying to take up valuable space in their working memory.  Worries about holidays, home life, and basic necessities such as food and supervision can crowd out and take priority over learning, and IQ can even temporarily drop from having too much cognitive load.  

The good news is that we can help remove some of the clutter from our students’ workspaces and free up room for the learning that must take place.  Classroom environment and instructional design can play a big part in alleviating an overwhelming cognitive load.  

Here are a few strategies that can have a big impact:

• Remove unnecessary complexity and distraction such as poor instructions, visually cluttered presentations, and things not relevant to the learning task (this does NOT mean to “water down” the curriculum or lessen the level or rigor).
• Create a safe classroom environment where students are not bullied or teased.
• Say less - get rid of lengthy explanations and irrelevant content.  Say the minimum you need to in order to convey the necessary information.
• Scaffold your students’ learning.
• Utilize student collaboration - group learning spreads the cognitive load between several brains, and can be more efficient when there are high cognitive demands.
• Provide cognitive aids and memory tools  - scratch paper, checklists, concept maps,  word association, key words, acronyms, loci method, or peg words - any supports that can offload some of the demands on working memory.  
• Help reduce student stress (which has a high impact on working memory) by teaching coping strategies, giving students increased control, and helping them feel connected to their classroom and school.

If we help our students to declutter their working memory, we can dramatically lessen their cognitive load and increase their learning.  I can’t think of a better reason to try to clean out some cognitive clutter!