Your Instructional Content and the Learner’s Mindset
Learning Basics
Learning is a process of gaining new knowledge and building on prior knowledge. It’s an active process in which, we as learners, engage with the content, making connections between new ideas and old. That’s the foundation of learning. There are:
- semester-long courses,
- five-minute demonstrations on YouTube,
- real-time in product how-to’s,
- one-hour e-learning modules hyper-focused on a key topic,
- and so on.
All of which the instruction is (or should be) designed with the purpose of its learner to process and retain information.
You, as a content developer or instructor, should write material in some fashion that helps your learners make those necessary mental connections — enabling them to build upon their prior knowledge with the ideas you present. Whether or not your learner is successful in doing so depends on how you address their cognitive engagement. Obviously, the content itself matters, but that’s the easy part. The hard part is getting someone else to understand what you’re teaching and be motivated to learn it.
So how do you get a learner to be cognitively engaged with your content?
One of the easiest viewpoints to start from is thinking about yourself as a learner. That’s not to say that you should simply write content based on how you learn, but while reading this article, relate the ideas presented to your own learning experiences then see how you can adapt your instructional content development for a learner’s mentality.
This article covers the learner’s mindset and what you should consider when creating your instructional content. In it, I’ll introduce a learner-first approach, and in later articles, I’ll expand upon the approach with processes and tools you can use when building content.
How the Brain Processes Information
Everyone has different learning preferences. Some say they are a hands-on learner or they can only remember what they write down. At a high-level, learning is information processing done by the brain, and it can be illustrated with the cognitive model shown below.
When your brain receives information, it processes the incoming information through three types of memory blocks:
- sensory memory,
- working memory (aka short-term memory), and
- long-term memory.
How Learning is Achieved within Each Memory Block
1. Sensory Block. Incoming information first hits your sensory memory — traditionally eyes and ears, but also perhaps touch, taste, and smell. Your brain takes that information from the sensory block, and either processes it into your working memory or discards it (i.e. forgets {😊 or ☹}).
2. Working Memory Block. Then your working memory categorizes the info it just received and attempts to assimilate it to the knowledge you have stored in long-term memory. If connections cannot be made to existing knowledge, the brain begins to build it as new knowledge. Working memory is limited to a finite amount of information it can hold at one time so some of the info is again forgotten.
3. Long-Term Block. Once your working memory has filtered and sorted the information from sensory, the information gets encoded into your long-term memory. Your brain’s long-term memory block holds information in schema-like structures. It organizes information according to how you use it.
For example, when you are first learning how to drive a vehicle, you may start with learning to drive a small sedan (advantageous for the parallel parking portion of your driver’s test {thumbs-up}). While learning, your brain works on building mental structures related to driving such as how to maneuver the car, when to apply the gas and brakes, or determining if you can safely make a left turn across oncoming traffic. You may initially learn on a small sedan, but you can easily apply your driving knowledge to driving trucks, vans, or other motor vehicles. There may be some additional things to learn, but the schema for driving is encoded in your brain.
Processing information through each memory block is how we build upon our current mental models, create new ones, and connect key informational chunks in our brain together.
So why is this important to know as an instructor?
Well, to teach content, you’ll use -
- a set of mediums to target your learner’s sensory memory,
- some organizational structure to help your learner’s working and long-term memory process the information, and
- a set of methods that enable your learner to relate key ideas to the knowledge they already have or to build new mental models.
Target Your Learner’s Sensory Memory Block
Your sensory memory has five channels to process information on. There are eyes for sight, ears for sound, nose for smell, mouth for taste, and skin for touch.
Let’s examine eyes and ears sensory targets. Pretty basic here, but for sound, we use words (or other noise); and for sight, we use written words and picture-type media, video included. Below is a diagram of how we process input mediums that use words or pictures.
Input mediums are the different ways we ‘send’ information to the learner’s sensory memory block. For eyes and ears, these input mediums are better thought of as multimedia. Multimedia encompasses audio, videos, animations, gifs, screencasts, plain old text, and so on.
What’s important about multimedia options is how they not only target different sensory channels but are processed separately.
When the learner’s sensory memory receives content, say a single entity that contains both words (sound) and pictures (sight) — such as a PowerPoint slide that has a picture and associated audio to describe the slide’s meaning — that entity is received on two sensory channels (ears, eyes). These channels are separate workstreams processed in the brain.
Think of the workstreams like stovetop burners you use to cook a meal with a main dish and side dishes. You can cook the main dish on one burner while the side dishes are also cooking on other burners. The end goal is to make each dish asynchronously so that everything can be ready to eat at the same time.
For your brain, you’re comprehending the content with both your eyes and ears (different channels) at the same time with the end goal to store it in long-term memory.
This is advantageous as a content developer.
It means when you want your learner to understand something, you have multiple opportunities to do so with one piece of instruction — one multimedia entity.
The instruction can contain words to hear, pictures to analyze, and so on. You’ll be more effective getting a point across to a learner using both sight and sound than just one sense alone.
What’s the caveat? …cognitive overload.
Be Cautious of Learner Cognitive Overload
Let’s examine another analogy, but this time regarding how it can be more effective to use multiple sensory channels and workstreams to assimilate knowledge while also avoiding sensory overload.
Think of presenting content as a water hose. You know, the one you drank from as a kid on a hot summer day playing outside. You turn on the hose and a stream of chilled water comes out. If you turn on the water spigot to full-blast and try to drink from it, you’ll get some in your mouth, but the rest will go everywhere else. That’s because you can’t physically drink that much water at that high of a water flow rate. This is similar to receiving instructional content on your sensory channels. You can’t process a ton of information all at once on the same channel.
But, think about a memory of drinking from a water hose (if you don’t have one, go make one). You can probably remember parts of the day such as the weather, where you were, maybe who you were with and what you were doing — that’s because your other sensory channels were processing other items like sight, sound, and touch, separately. Your brain created your memory of drinking from a hose using multiple channels and separate workstreams. Your brain also learned that you can’t get a satisfactory sip of water when the hose is turned on full blast.
It’s difficult to process a ton of information on the same channel. This highlights what’s called cognitive load.
Cognitive load is the amount of information your brain takes on to process whether it’s on one channel or multiple.
People have a limited capacity of what they can process in each sensory channel at one time. So, to effectively teach material, you need to be aware of this limitation and cater to the learner’s capacity if you want them to have a meaningful learning experience. You don’t want to overload one channel over another or present information as a firehose on full-blast on all channels.
This introduces another concept; it’s also difficult to process the same information that’s repeated on different channels.
For example, think about how you feel when someone is presenting a PowerPoint slide and simply reading the text on the slide. Sure, they’re using sight and sound to get the message across. But the message is the same on both channels, forcing your brain to process that same message twice and on two separate workstreams. It’s a waste of your cognitive effort. As a result, your brain is likely to discard more of that information than if it was only on one channel.
So, when presenting your content — trying to get your learner to assimilate your ideas in their long-term memory — consider what sensory channels you want to target and what to put on those channels so your learner’s brain can best process it.
Short Summary
So, to take my own advice and avoid being a water hose, let’s stop here and summarize. Our goal as instructors or content developers is to create content that empowers our learners to process and retain information. Learners do this by making connections between new ideas and old or by building new mental models. This is a cognitive process in which our brains use different sensory channels to accept information such as sight and sound. We trigger those channels with text, videos, pictures, diagrams, and so on.
We should strategically use these channels to create an effective learning experience while making sure not to overload our learners with too much information on one channel or with the same information on multiple channels.
Creating good instructional content can be summed up into three aspects you’ll use:
- a set of mediums to target your learner’s sensory memory,
- an organizational structure to help your learner’s working and long-term memory blocks process the content, and
- a set of methods that enable your learner to relate key ideas to the knowledge they already have or to build new mental models.
We’ve covered the basics of information processing, cognitive theory, and your learner’s sensory memory block. In upcoming articles, I’ll delve into how to organize your content for a more effective learning experience as well as the methods you can use to help cognitively engage your learner.
Thanks for reading!
