Cognitive Load Theory, Evolutionary Educational Psychology, and Instructional Design

Evolutionary educational psychology provides a framework for more fully understanding what we learn, how we learn, and informs us of the instructional procedures that should work in modern schools. Knowledge can be categorized into biologically primary knowledge that can be acquired automatically through natural activities such as play without explicit tuition and biologically secondary knowledge that needs to be taught explicitly. During secondary learning, human cognition constitutes a natural information processing system that has evolved to mimic the architecture of biological evolution. Cognitive load theory uses this architecture to generate a large range of instructional effects concerned with procedures for reducing extraneous working memory load in order to facilitate the acquisition of secondary knowledge in long-term memory. This chapter reviews the evolutionary and cognitive bases of the theory and summarizes some of the instructional effects generated.

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