雅思阅读

📖 Reading Passage

The concept of 'cognitive load' refers to the total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory. In educational psychology, cognitive load theory suggests that learning is most effective when instructional materials are designed to minimize extraneous cognitive load, thereby freeing resources for the intrinsic load necessary to understand complex tasks. For instance, when students are presented with a diagram and accompanying text that are physically separated, they must expend mental energy to integrate the information, increasing extraneous load. Conversely, integrating visual and verbal explanations in a single, coherent format can reduce this load and enhance comprehension. However, researchers caution that reducing load is not always beneficial; for novice learners, some redundancy may actually support schema construction, whereas for experts, it can impede learning by causing unnecessary repetition. Thus, effective instructional design must consider the learner's prior knowledge and the complexity of the material to optimize cognitive processing.