Strategies to Consider

Keep asking yourself the question “what do students need to know and be able to do, to perform this task”. For each answer you come up with, ask the question again, so that you drill down through the layers to reach a granular set of knowledge and skills that are needed.

Involve others in the course design and material review and task decomposition.

See if there is a published work that already breaks down the task analysis that you can use.

Help your students manage their cognitive load by clearly communicating your goals and priorities for the task you need them to complete.

Decide whether students will practice the task in isolation or as part of a larger context.

Find out if students have the required prior knowledge to complete the task. Remember we looked at strategies for doing this in Principle 1. If you find that students are missing skills or that they are weak, create opportunities for them to practice this skill in isolation, before asking them to complete tasks that involve integrating component skills.

Give students practice to increase fluency
Remember as students become consciously competent, it’s still a high cognitive load. Give them practice so that they can become faster and more fluent in using their new skills. It’s a good idea to explain this to students. If we think back to the driving analogy, it’s important that a driver can change gear quickly to respond to a situation on the road. We can therefore explain Why it’s important to practice the skill of gear change until it becomes fluent.

Temporarily constrain the scope of the task
We can help reduce the cognitive load for a student by temporarily asking them to practice one part of the task in isolation. For example, we might have our novice driver practice reversing in a straight line several times, before asking them to perform a three-point turn.

Explicitly include integration in your performance criteria
Integration is a key step towards mastery, so it’s a good idea to reflect this in your course and assignment rubrics.

Strategies to Consider

Don’t assume that because students have learned a skill they know when to use it. You need to be explicit about when they can use it and give them practice at making this decision for themselves.

Give opportunities to practice applying skills in several different and diverse contexts.

• Ask students to generalize to larger principles
• Use comparisons to help students identify deep features. This can mean looking for differences between features that on the surface look the same. Or looking for underlying patterns in features that look similar on the surface

• Use scenarios and case studies that give a context and ask students to identify relevant skills or knowledge
• List the skills or knowledge and ask students when and where they can apply them
• You can help students form connections between knowledge with simple prompts. Like “remember we looked at how to help student’s make meaningful connections as part of principle 2 on knowledge organisation”.