{"id":79269,"date":"2025-12-27T00:22:54","date_gmt":"2025-12-27T05:22:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=79269"},"modified":"2025-12-27T00:22:54","modified_gmt":"2025-12-27T05:22:54","slug":"studying-more-hours-doesnt-always-mean-learning-more-the-cognitive-load-trap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/studying-more-hours-doesnt-always-mean-learning-more-the-cognitive-load-trap\/","title":{"rendered":"Studying more hours doesn’t always mean learning more: the cognitive load trap"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Imagine trying to fill a water bottle with a fire hose at full pressure. Most of the water would spill out, and the bottle would still be half empty. Something very similar happens in our brains when we try to learn by rote memorization, which is why we’ve all found ourselves reading a text over and over again without being able to retain anything.<\/span><\/p>\n

Faced with these kinds of situations, we often believe that spending more time studying or increasing our study materials will improve our understanding. But this quantitative approach is rarely effective, because the human brain doesn’t learn by accumulation, but by integration. In other words, in learning, less is more.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why does this happen, and what is its relationship to the concept of “cognitive load”?<\/span><\/p>\n

Cognitive load and working memory<\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n

Cognitive load<\/span><\/a>\u00a0is\u00a0the mental effort we exert to process new information. It has two components: intrinsic, which is the inherent difficulty of the subject matter; and extrinsic. The latter can be “bad” or ineffective when mental effort is wasted due to excessive stimuli, irrelevant information, confusing explanations, or redundant content; or adequate when mental effort is optimal for selecting new information, processing it, and relating it to previously learned knowledge.<\/span><\/p>\n

To learn, the ideal is to reduce the extrinsic load and modulate the intrinsic load, to leave space in the place where learning is processed to pass into memory: working memory.<\/span><\/p>\n

Our “RAM” can only hold between 5 and 9 elements<\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n

Working memory is the processor or RAM of our brain; that is, the ability to retain and manipulate information for a short period of time. The problem is that its capacity is very limited, only able to hold between 5 and 9 items. So much so that if we exceed this capacity, if we are suddenly bombarded with more information than our brain can process, it will simply be lost.<\/span><\/p>\n

So our ability to learn depends on using our working memory efficiently. In fact, we know that working memory is\u00a0<\/span>predictive of academic performance<\/span><\/a>\u00a0, especially in reading and math, and that it increases with training.<\/span><\/p>\n

How to improve working memory?<\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n

Teachers can contribute to the development of working memory by improving the design of their teaching practices. Intrinsic workload is obviously unavoidable; we cannot eliminate it, but we can reduce it, for example, by segmenting information from simple to complex.<\/span><\/p>\n

Extrinsic burden, however, does depend primarily on us. Some simple actions to reduce it are:<\/span><\/p>\n