Requirements
Barriers – Cognitive and Physical Black Holes
Indeed, many barriers in the curriculum or instruction (to include strategies, materials, and assessments) and in the environment (such as sounds or physical arrangement) are barriers because they demand our learners’ cognitive or physical resources. That demand detracts them from what we want them to actually focus on. Undue cognitive load resulting from poor design of materials, strategies, and the environment can unnecessarily limit the amount of learning that can take place.
Cognitive Load - According to the theory of cognitive load, attention is a limited cognitive resource, and learning becomes a function of how much attention is allocated the new material to be acquired. For example, if a student must allocate his or her attention to determining how a text passage relates to a presented diagram, then he or she does not learn the actual material because his or her attention has not been focused on comprehending the content of the text and diagram, only the relationship. Furthermore, humans have a limited capacity for the amount of information they can process in each of the sensory channels at one time (Baddeley, 1992; Chandler & Sweller, 1991). Undue cognitive or physical load can diminish a learner’s ability to recall and retain information because her ability to attend to it in the first place was facing competition from multiple sources of information.
So let’s look at specific instructional and environmental barriers and discuss solutions.
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