Thread by @cbokhove

When people discuss CLT effects I seldom hear them mention that Sweller et al. (2019) themselves call some 'compound effects', which he imo rather vaguely calls them 'not a simple effect' but 'an effect that alters the characteristics of other cognitive load effects' (p. 276).

Interestingly, compound effects 'frequently indicate the limits of other load effects.'. In other words, in some contexts effects that might be relevant, are not relevant any more because of such effects.

Five effects are deemed 'compound effects'. One of the 'old effects' is element interactivity, where there is a distinction between learning materials with high and low element interactivity (let me just say 'complexity of the materials').

Expertise reversal and Guidance fading might be the most well-known ones. Effects might not be applicable for complete novices (but when do they become relevant then? Could be after 30 minutes?) or at the beginning of a learning sequence.

The transient information effect is known but do people know it is a compound effect? "Cognitive load effects that are found for transient information are typically not found for non-transient or less transient information." (p. 267).

This again strikes me quite vague (some e.g.s. of effects are mentioned), especially 'less transient'. From memory, I think the 'transient information effect' already happened with 15 words.

The last one is called the 'self-management effect', which says that when you encounter ill-designed materials, you can explicitly teach learners how they themselves can reduce such extraneous load.

Of course, in an ideal world you would have perfect materials, but the last effect does beg the question, in my opinion, whether being able to deal with instances of 'non-optimal-load' might be more useful. After all, a student can self-manage that, not teachers' materials.

In any case, it seems important to note that Cognitive Load Theory's own accounts of the theory, there are five effects that interact with others, and that it never can be a case of adopting CLT principles 'to reduce load'.

I’ve been searching a bit more where these effects have been called ‘compound effects’ but for now I can only find the 2019 article. That imo makes it quite a sudden, substantial change...