The instructor for the weight lifting class my friend and I regularly take was out of town, and the substitute he had that night is not my cup of tea. We decided that, instead of taking a class, we would work out on side by side treadmills. She's training for a marathon, so she would be able to run while I walked and experimented with inclines.
Now, the Y has some fancy treadmills with fans and touchscreens that allow you to access Netflix, TV, even Facebook and Twitter. Then, I noticed you could play Solitaire. I thought, "that might make for an interesting distraction."
Well, I was right, it was a distraction. It was also the most difficult game of Solitaire I have ever played. I said to my friend, "This is like a cognitive test where they put you under some kind of stress and see if you can still complete a task." The combination of pain in my glutes from the incline, difficulty keeping pace from a constant elevated speed, and leaning in to move the cards on the screen made for a working memory overload like I haven't experienced in quite some time.
Then end result was that I didn't do either the workout or the game very well. While I was quite sore the next day, it wouldn't make for a very efficient workout on a regular basis. And the game, well, I wasn't going to be winning any championships there either.
This got me thinking about teachers I have seen (and been) trying to get kids to do two things at the same time. It may seem like playing a video while kids work on a paper will be helpful, but the reality is that they won't get much out of the video, and they won't give you their best work on a paper. I have found that students working on a paper in a quiet study hall still don't get much done because there people next to them for a task that really requires focused alone time.
One of the things that was most difficult for me during the hybrid year of the pandemic was working memory overload. In the beginning, I would reach cognitive load by 8AM because of the multitude of unfamiliar procedures in using technology to both broadcast my classroom to those at home and show what needed to be shown to those in the room. While that got easier with time and practice, I was still dividing my working memory between those on the screen and those physically in front of me. It's why this model, while needed at the time, was unsustainable for future years. You just cannot maintain a split focus and do either thing particularly well.
As the great Ron Swanson said to Leslie Knope, "Don't half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing."
This week, I got two more lessons, this time from in tests. I was helping out in a room where kids with accommodations take their exams. Some of them are not required to fill in the scan card, so the adults in the room transfer their answers from the test to the card. As I was doing that, I encountered a matching section with 10 options. You may know that the scancard only has A through E, so there were also choices labeled AA (which is not possible to bubble on a scan card), AB, AC, AD, and AE.
This was hard for me to fill in, and all I was doing was transferring their answers. I was not a kid under stress, attempting to go back and forth between the test and the card while making sure to fill in both A and C on the same line. I kept thinking, "How hard would it have been to have two matching sections with A through E on both of them?"
The answer is that it wouldn't have been hard. This teacher just didn't think of that.
Another exam was made using College Board questions for an AP test, and this is not the fault of the teacher. When a teacher chooses questions from AP Classroom, the formatting is preset and unalterable. This results in images that take up a full page. While that might sound nice, it means that the question the student is answer is on a different page than the source they must reference to answer it. It also often meant having a question on the bottom of the page with the answer choices on the top of the next page (and depending on how it was printed, the student might have to flip the page over to get to the choices. Again, I was having difficulty, and all I was asked to do was transfer the answers from the test to the scan sheet.
College Board, it is almost 2025, and you make gajillions of dollars! How about investing some of it in giving the teacher edit ability over their tests rather than dumping it all into AI grading? It will cost less, give teachers more agency, and not result in a working memory nightmare for students. (Not to mention it would slow the progression of AI making us less human, which we will regret but refuse to see because convenience is our national religion. Okay, anti AI rant over for the moment.)
When we start approaching students with working memory in mind, we do things differently.
- We intentionally stop talking when we want them to concentrate on solving a problem.
- We don't put something on the screen while we are saying the same thing out loud. We put them up separately.
- We don't expect them to remember multi-step instructions and carry them out simultaneously. We put the instructions on the board or on a paper handout.
- We don't put an un-needed image on our slides just to have an image (or gifs that repeatedly take up space in their brains). We do put helpful images that make our point clearer.
- We do give appropriate wait time between asking a question an expecting an answer.
- We format tests (when we have the ability to) in such a way that the student doesn't have to switch his focus back and forth between question, choices, and resources.
- And we, in the name of all that is holy, do not put more than 5 options in a matching section when they are expected to fill out a 5 space scantron.
If you have been guilty of this (and Lord knows, I HAVE BEEN), a new semester is upon you. This isn't about shame. You know better now, so you can do better now. Put the past behind you and forge ahead with working memory challenges in mind.
Say to yourself, "I will not ask my students to walk quickly up a hill while playing a game of solitaire."
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