for students to grasp and provides pedagogical challenge to educators. It has an inherent difficulty associated with it (intrinsic cognitive load). This inherent difficulty may not be altered by an instructor by didactic lecture or by static slides without animation (extraneous cognitive load) and it then becomes difficult for the student to understand core concepts in renal physiology like ren...

Human working memory can be defined as a component system responsible for the temporary storage and manipulation of information related to higher level cognitive behaviors, such as understanding and reasoning (Baddeley, 1992; Becker & Morris, 1999). Working memory, while able to manage a complex array of cognitive activities, presents with an unexpected peculiarity, in that only a few elements ...

The split-attention principle states that when designing instruction, including multimedia instruction, it is important to avoid formats that require learners to split their attention between, and mentally integrate, multiple sources of information. Instead, materials should be formatted so that disparate sources of information are physically and temporally integrated thus obviating the need fo...

Strategies of presenting instructional information affect the type of cognitive load imposed on the learner's working memory. Effective instruction reduces extraneous (ineffective) cognitive load and promotes germane (effective) cognitive load. Eighty first-year students from two veterinary schools completed a two-section questionnaire that evaluated their perspectives on the educational value ...

describes several excellent strategies to optimize intrinsic load and minimize extraneous load. As noted by the authors, there is legitimate disagreement about the construct of germane cognitive load and how it relates to intrinsic load. However, we do not agree with Leppink and Van den Heuvel’s rejection of germane load as an independent construct. Four of six prior studies performed by Leppin...

The present contribution presents two field studies combining tools and methods from cognitive psychology and from occupational psychology in order to perform a thorough investigation of workload in employees. Cognitive load theory proposes to distinguish different load categories of working memory, in a context of instruction. Intrinsic load is inherent to the task, extraneous load refers to c...

ISSUE The transfer of a patient from one clinician to another is a high-risk event. Errors are common and lead to patient harm. More effective methods for learning how to give and receive sign-out is an important public health priority. EVIDENCE Performing a handoff is a complex task. Trainees must simultaneously apply and integrate clinical, communication, and systems skills into one time-li...

The aim of this study is to investigate pre-service teacher’s cognitive load types (intrinsic load-IL, extraneous load-EL, and germane load-GL), academic achievements, and affective characteristics (attitude and self-efficacy) at two stages of experimental learning processes. The first and the second groups used explanatory instructional multimedia science simulations (EImms-1 and EImms-2), and...