To view or not to view; what is a distractor?

I often participate in training sessions where the starting point is Willingham’s working memory model, and I am sure many of you will already have seen the diagram and heard colleagues’ comments on cognitive overload. So, for those of you who are well versed in this topic, please bear with me as I provide a simple overview of the working memory model for my more novice readers.

Simply speaking the brain is bombarded with millions of pieces of information on a daily basis via our senses. Fortunately, our brain is very adept at filtering information deemed irrelevant, so, it never actually reaches our working memory, it is simply forgotten. One way to illustrate this is for you to carefully read the sentence below.

I expect that you are sitting down as you read this article, perhaps you have your elbows on the table or desk.

Now that I have pointed this out to you, you are suddenly paying attention to it, you are consciously thinking and aware of both the sensation of sitting and the feeling of the table on your elbows, prior to me alerting you to this, your brain had filtered this irrelevant information and hence it had been forgotten.

So, now we know that the first step to remembering stimuli is to be consciously aware of it, and it is from this awareness or attention, that thinking manifests in our working memory. Thinking however will also involve you pulling information and skills from your long-term memory so that you are able to make sense or connect some of your new learning to your existing schemata. If a pupil has not already acquired the necessary knowledge and skills in their long-term memory, then they may find the new information confusing and meaningless, resulting in them being unable to transfer this to their long-term memory, and hence it will be forgotten.

Capacity of working memory

We also know that the capacity of our working memory model is limited to approximately five pieces of information, whilst the long-term memory is thought to be infinite. This presents a challenge for educationalists as they constantly must be mindful of the cognitive load being experienced by their pupils.

One way that educationalists are mindful of cognitive load, is by introducing information in small manageable chunks. But it is possible to reduce cognitive load even before we reach this point in a lesson, by using strategies to recognise and minimise the environmental distractors within our classrooms.

We all want our classrooms to look inviting and welcoming for our pupils but what if this is actually impeding on their learning. We have already established that the capacity of working memory is limited, and we often assume that it is teacher instruction that may cause a cognitive overload, but pupils can also experience cognitive overload if they start to pay attention to environmental distractors.

The most common environmental distractors in our classrooms are either visual or acoustic, and in this article, I am primarily going to focus on visual distractors. But before I begin, it might be useful to try and see your classroom through the lens of a pupil. One way to do this is by sitting at a pupil’s desk and scanning the classroom to see if you can identify any potential visual distractors that could impact on your pupils’ attention or cognitive load.

When I did this activity, I found that my top three classroom visual distractors were:

  • Display boards
  • The classroom clock
  • Windows

To read more of Kirsten Russell’s article, please click here.