We investigated whether seductive details (i.e., interesting but irrelevant adjuncts) are harmful to learning only when students (mistakenly) think that they are relevant. We therefore conducted a study in which participants (N = 86) learned either without seductive details (control condition) or with seductive details--in the latter case with or…

Purpose: Pupillary responses captured via pupillometry (measurement of pupillary dilation and constriction during the performance of a cognitive task) are psychophysiological indicators of cognitive effort, attention, arousal, and resource engagement. Pupillometry may be a promising tool for enhancing our understanding of the relationship between…

Negative effects of seductive details have been well documented. One current line of research focussed on solutions to reducing the seductive details effect is becoming increasingly promising. Contributing to this line of research, this study investigated whether perceptual load moderated the seductive details effect. The study used a 2 × 2…

Purpose: The primary purpose of this study was to examine the effect of sentence length on speech rate and its characteristics, articulation rate and pauses, in typically developing children. Method: Sixty-two typically developing children between the ages of 10 and 14 years repeated sentences varying in length from two to seven words. Dependent…

Students' opportunities to learn science are shaped by the intellectual work in which they engage in science classrooms. By considering the opportunity to learn as a more nuanced and complex concept than simply as exposure to the subject matter, we argue that the kind of tasks that teachers assign to students presents an important element to…

The purposes of this study were to evaluate the effects of an auditory-distractor stimulus and vocal-blocking task on performance on a math task and measures of overt verbal operants. College students served as participants, and they were instructed to solve an arithmetic problem while continuously emitting overt verbal behavior. The overt verbal…

Supporting language in mathematics classrooms requires both curriculum material that follows language-responsive design principles and teaching practices that enact these principles with high instructional quality. This paper presents the analytic framework L-TRU, which was developed to assess language-responsive teaching practices quantitatively.…

This study examined how instructional librarians can incorporate principles from cognitive load theory to engage students in research and improve learning outcomes for a common library instructional delivery model. The study employed a between-subjects, quasi-experimental design to compare how instructional sessions would impact information…

Within the fields of learning design, instructional systems and educational psychology, cognitive load has been discussed and debated for a number of years. The impact of course designs on learning process is still questioned, and how we learn continues to be an intriguing question. The fields of working memory (WM) and cognitive load (CL) have…

Aim: To investigate mask use and the difficulties it may pose during communication in healthcare settings. Methods: A survey utilizing a series of Likert scales was administered. Mask use challenges between clinicians and their patients were examined in the domains of communication, listening effort, cognition, and rehabilitation. Results: Across…

The notion of "Micro-Learning" (ML) has been repeatedly accented as a successful learning approach in different learning phenomena. Despite these optimistic emphases, several studies lack a theoretical grounding in adoption of ML, thus missing a shared perspective of the education community. The scarce theoretical justification for…

Previous work with complex memory span tasks, in which simple choice decisions are imposed between presentations of to-be-remembered items, shows that these secondary tasks reduce memory span. It is less clear how reconfiguring and maintaining various amounts of information affects decision speeds. We introduced preliminary "lead-in"…

The objective of this research has been the analysis of the effectiveness of sports performance through a program, based on the assimilation of contents from a previous diagnosis. The almost-experimental design was applied like a pre- during program. Eighty-two students from Basic Education Career of UPSE have participated in this study, developed…

Novice programmers, who have yet to form effective mental models of the domain, often experience high cognitive load, low confidence, and high anxiety, negatively affecting learning and retention rates. These cognitive and affective limitations pose an instructional challenge. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of a whole-task…

Based on our work teaching undergraduate Calculus courses, we offer insight into teaching the chain rule to reduce cognitive load for students. A particularly difficult topic for students to grasp, problems likely arise due to student struggles with the concept of function and, particularly, function composition relative to when they first…