Construct · 3 fields · 5 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · load and workload, rarely cross-cited Nearest construct by meaningperceived ease of usecompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to cognitive load is perceived ease of use.
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The load imposed on working memory by a learning task, which Sweller introduced in 1988 after finding that conventional problem solving directs limited working memory toward reaching a goal rather than toward acquiring schemas. Sweller, van Merriënboer, and Paas later separated the load into three sources: intrinsic load set by the element interactivity of the material, extraneous load imposed by the way instruction is designed, and germane load devoted to building and automating schemas. The construct is defined against a fixed architecture, a narrow working memory that holds novel information and an effectively unlimited long-term memory, and its purpose is prescriptive: cut extraneous load so that capacity is left for learning.[1][2]
The demand a task imposes on a human operator, which the human factors tradition calls mental workload and treats as a property of the operator in a system rather than of a learner acquiring schemas. Hart and Staveland built the NASA Task Load Index in 1988 from six subscales, mental demand, physical demand, temporal demand, performance, effort, and frustration, combined by pairwise weighting into a single workload score. The construct grew out of aviation and process-control settings where the question is whether an operator can keep up with a task, and Hart's 2006 review found the instrument in wide use across domains far from that origin. The tradition developed largely without reference to Sweller, so the same intuition of a load on limited mental resources carries a different name, a different instrument, and a different criterion.[3][4]
The problem of measuring cognitive load well enough to test the theory, which Paas, Tuovinen, Tabbers, and Van Gerven set out in 2003 as a precondition for advancing cognitive load theory rather than as a separate construct. Their proposal pairs a subjective rating of invested mental effort, a single question close in form to the human factors workload scales, with task performance, and reports the two together as a measure of instructional efficiency. This is where the two traditions come nearest: a rating borrowed from workload research is put to work for a learning construct. Paas and colleagues are explicit that a rating of effort and a measure of performance answer different questions, and that a claim about load needs both.[5]
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