Substantive Contribution

From this week’s notes, I wanted to focus on how the types of cognitive loads relate to educational comics.

Extraneous Cognitive Load

In order to limit extraneous cognitive load, it is important to create a comic that has a reasonable balance between text and images, and to only include essential information. Keeping the main message clear and organized can also help prevent an overwhelmed reader.

Intrinsic Cognitive Load

In terms of intrinsic cognitive load, segmenting helps by grouping important information under specific topics which helps with clarity. Pretraining may not be particularly relevant, depending on the topic of the educational comic, but is important if you are teaching brand new content. Modality may also not be relevant in terms of an educational comic as it outlines how having spoken words and images is more effective than written text and images, and spoken words are not used in comics.

Germane Cognitive Load

Lastly, germane cognitive load is the goal that we should be aiming for when creating educational content. However, this can be challenging as individuals all learn differently and have varying capacities, making it important to understand diverse learning styles when creating learning materials.

Images used in this blog are sourced from Freepik