Help! My brain runneth over: Schemas, Scaffolds, and CLT

“Information overload!” the students screamed, running from the lecture. “My mind is a dripping sponge!”

Ever felt like that? Of course you have. Our brains are limited: We can only learn so much.

Studies of how we learn can help us understand why we feel like our brains are full and what we can do about it. One helpful explanation is Cognitive Load Theory (CLT). CLT can help us think about how we learn and how we can learn better.

What is it?

Cognitive Load Theory explains a lot. It works like this:

CLT proposes that our minds have three levels of memory:

Copied from “Cognitive Load Theory – Helping People Learn Effectively” (http://mindtools.com , 17/10/2023).

These three parts are:

Sensory memory – The part of our mind that takes in all ‘input,’ visual, audible, and the rest.

Sensory memory is very short-term. It receives input, filters out the extraneous, and sends the remainder to working memory, all in a matter of seconds.

Working memory – Where our brains process things. Working memory draws on both long-term and sensory memory. This is where we think.

Importantly, working memory seems unable to process more than 5-9 separate information items at a time, perhaps less. This limits our learning.

Information either drops out from working memory or is sent to long-term memory.

Long-term memory – Where our brains store information permanently.

The key to this is that we store nearly everything in schema or units of related material. Thus, while you might start learning church history with discrete facts, people, and events, these soon become a schema or framework that holds everything together as a single unit.

And here’s where it gets interesting: While working memory can deal with a maximum of 5-9 items at a time, a schema and all its associated information count as a single item. And when you know it really well, then it almost doesn’t count as an item.

Once you incorporate new knowledge into a schema, it fixes itself into our long-term memory. Otherwise we lose it.

Note: When a lecturer talks about scaffolding, they mean helping you build a new schema or activate an existing one. Then you can integrate their new information into a schema. (But understanding and using that knowledge is a different matter of skills and wisdom; that comes with training, mentoring, practice, reflection, and humility.)

So what?

CLT is a very nice explanation and accords quite well with reality. But how can you use it as a student? In many ways, it turns out:

Allow for the depleters

Not every day will be the same for learning.

Emotional, mental, and physical tasks all draw from the same energy reserve. So our energy for learning is limited and depleted by things like grief, change, illness, relational difficulties, exhaustion, anxiety, and the like. These are normal in our broken world; they will draw down on the energy you could apply to learning.

Learning will seldom be optimal for long. Allow for the depleters by building in margin and capacity and adjusting for them.

Emotional, mental, and physical tasks all draw from the same reserve of energy.

Minimise the distractors

You cannot minimise every depleter, but you can control some of them:

Sensory memory is easily overwhelmed, so minimise distractors like noise or carrying on a conversation while reading. We can’t effectively take in multiple channels of information simultaneously.

Working memory is limited to a handful of items, so reduce the distractors, and you will increase your working memory. Major distractors include a pinging phone or a busy social media conversation. Fun, but costly during learning time.

And while we cannot take in multiple audio channels or visual channels, we can take in one audio and one visual simultaneously. Thus, listening to a lecture with appropriate graphical slides is so helpful.

And long-term memory depends heavily on sleep to help us consolidate information. Don’t short yourself on sleep.

Likewise, increase your capacity by engaging in revivers: People, fun, downtime, exercise, and good food. You are not a computer that can run 24/7. You are a finite person, called to live in the infinite Lord.

Build on your schemas

Once we incorporate new knowledge into a schema, it requires progressively less energy until it becomes automatic and nearly effortless. CLT tells us that learning is effortful and happens over time.

Learning takes serious effort and time.

I know you students are very busy. But it is a false economy merely to rush into every class, take notes unprepared, and then ignore content until exam time. Such a process means we don’t start integrating that content into our long-term schemas. Instead, we largely lose them until we re-teach ourselves just before the exams. So try a couple of these ideas:

• Prepare for some lectures regularly, and revise and consolidate some material regularly in a group or on your own.

• Use Cornell notes in lectures and research, listing your questions and connections.

• Regularly revise with the Big Three and the Little Three.

• Test yourself, write exam questions, or explain content to a friend.

• Keep a five-minute reflective journal twice a week, reflecting on the implications of class content.

Simple steps like these help cement content into the schemas of your long-term memory. They help you learn it for good. With effort, you can become automatic with them.

Whatever you do, keep it simple so you will keep it up.

Expect progress!

Finally, expect progress and payoff if you can do even a bit of this. Of course you can’t do all of this all the time, but you can do some of this most of the time.

The more you move new content into your schemas, the more you will learn and the less tired your brain will be.

Learning is effortful. Plan to work at it.

Learning takes time. Allow it to take time.

The more you move new content into schemas, the more you will retain, and the less tired your brain will be.

Further reading:

A decent explanation from a commercial website: Cognitive Load Theory – Helping People Learn Effectively (mindtools.com).

A good explanation of how our cognitive capacity decreases with external stresses: A BBC article from the COVID lockdown years.