Efficiency in Learning: Evidence-Based Guidelines to Manage Cognitive Load

Chapter 8. Transition from Worked Examples to Practice to Impose Mental Work Gradually

IT'S CONVENTIONAL WISDOM that the best way to build skills is practice—and lots of it! But practice is expensive. First, it's costly to design effective practice exercises, and second, completing practice assignments absorbs a great deal of the learner's instructional time. Psychologically, working many practice exercises imposes mental load on working memory that is counterproductive to initial learning.

In this chapter we offer a proven method to make your training more effective and more efficient by using a series of worked and completion examples that require ...