Cognitive Load Theory

Cognitive load theory examines the mental effort a learning task places on working memory. It distinguishes three kinds of load: intrinsic load, the inherent difficulty of the material itself; extraneous load, added unnecessarily by how the material is presented or the task is designed; and germane load, the effort spent building lasting knowledge structures, or schemas, in long-term memory. Because working memory can hold only a small amount of new information at once, the theory argues that instruction should cut extraneous load and manage intrinsic load so more capacity is left for germane load. John Sweller developed the theory in the late 1980s from research on problem solving, and it has since become one of the most cited frameworks in instructional design, though later researchers have questioned whether the three loads simply add together as the original model proposed.