Researchers typically work by isolating variables. If a research team wants to study — say — the effect of fluorescent light on learning, they should compare close-to-identical students and close-to-identical lessons in close-to-identical classrooms. The ONLY difference should be the light.
But here’s the catch: while researchers isolate variables, teachers combine variables. We have to think about the curriculum AND working memory load AND the upcoming fire drill AND the new daily schedule. And — who knows — the installation of new fluorescent lights.
For that reason, teachers can be especially excited when we find researchers who COMBINE topics the way we do every day. For example, consider these two questions:
- How hard are my students thinking right now?
- How motivated are my students by the work they’re doing?
To teachers, those sound like related questions. But researchers often study either academic motivation or cognition; the two fields are often siloed.
I’ve recently been looking into a theory that combines those two topics; I think you’ll find that combination useful. Here’s the story.
“Load Reduction Instruction,” and Beyond
Personal trainers want gym-goers to lift as much weight as they safely can. If I go to the gym and pick up paperclips, I’m not going to gain much muscle. If I carry a grand piano upstairs, I’ve got a trip to the ER in my near future.
Teachers, like personal trainers, want our students to lift an appropriate cognitive load. The work should be hard enough for them to gain mental muscle, but not so hard that their thinking collapses in frustration, despair, and apathy.
For several years now, scholar Andrew Martin has been researching cognitive load in the classroom. Specifically, as he argued in this 2016 talk, we should be interested in the relationship between cognitive load and motivation. If I ask my students to solve excessively difficult problems, they’ll fail — and lose motivation. By making the cognitive load manageable, I can help them succeed…and thereby increase motivation. As that talk argues, load reduction instruction might boost motivation and engagement. Simpler tasks allow students to succeed; success brings confidence; confidence results in motivation.
So far, Martin’s argument sounds intuitively straightforward. But, as Martin acknowledges in that talk, he’s offering a theory — one that didn’t have direct classroom evidence to support it.
So: what’s happened since 2016?
The Singapore Study
Good news: we now have some experimental data to consider.
A study published in 2023 offers data to support our intuition. Dr. Munira Kadir and colleagues studied the classrooms of four 7th grade science teachers in Singapore. All four teachers worked within an “inquiry learning” paradigm; over the course of six weeks, two of them incorporated “load reduction instruction” (LRI) into their teaching.
Teachers in the LRI sections,
- started with simple, closed tasks before open-ended, inquiry-focused ones
- provided higher levels of scaffolding
- gave practice questions as homework
- offered regular feedback
- checked for understanding of foundational ideas before moving on to independent discovery
The other two teachers, in the control condition,
- assigned open-ended questions throughout the units
- provided less scaffolding and minimal feedback
- aimed for independent learning throughout these units
Kadir’s team first measured students’ learning. In the control group, students scored a 2.5/10 on the pre-unit tests to a 5.2/10 on post-unit tests. The LRI group started with lower pre-unit test scores (2.1/10), and rose substantially more (7.8/10) on the post tests. The control group raised their scores 2.7 points; the LRI group, 5.7 points. Whichever statistical framework you want to use, that’s an impressive difference.
The researchers also gathered self-report data about students’ feeling of competence, interest, self-regulation, and career aspirations. LRI made no difference for reported self-regulation and career aspirations; it helped only slightly for students’ interest. But for feeling of competence, the difference will get your attention.
Students in the LRI group rated their own feeling of competence slightly higher at the end of six weeks: on a scale of 1-6, the average rose from 4.19 to 4.36. But — here’s the big news — students in the control group reported a distressing decline in their feeling of competence. They started with a higher rating than the LRI group — 4.40 — and ended with a 3.47: almost a full point drop!
In this study:
- instruction that focuses on managing cognitive load helps students learn more, and maintained their feelings of competence, whereas
- instruction that strictly adheres to a pure inquiry paradigm offers fewer learning benefits and meaningfully reduces students’ feeling of competence.
Treading Carefully
Kadir’s study, of course, is not the final word on this topic.
- As Dan Willingham says: “one study is just one study, folks.” We’d love to see similar studies in other disciplines, other grades, and other cultural contexts.
- The control group for this study is “business as usual.” That is: two teachers got something: a fun new method and lots of extra training; two teachers got nothing. Perhaps we’re seeing the difference between something and nothing, not the difference between inquiry+LRI and straight-up inquiry.
- We should also note that Martin’s initial LRI claim is that “effective cognitive load management can enhance motivation.” This study, however, doesn’t measure motivation directly. We can plausibly infer that people feel more motivation when they feel more competent; both common sense and self-determination theory tell us so. But this research team didn’t explicitly measure motivation as an outcome.
Even with these critiques, I do think Kadir’s study merits our attention. After all:
- Common sense tells us that students who succeed at their academic work will feel more motivated to undertake it.
- Andrew Martin lays out a substantial theory explaining why that would be so.
- Team Kadir’s research finds that load management results in more learning and sustains students’ feeling of competence.
When classroom experience, theory, and research align, we have good reason to start incorporating these ideas more carefully into our practice.
Kadir, M. S., Yeung, A. S., Caleon, I. S., Diallo, T. M., Forbes, A., & Koh, W. X. (2023). The effects of load reduction instruction on educational outcomes: An intervention study on hands‐on inquiry‐based learning in science. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 37(4), 814-829.
