Skip to main content

Cognitive (Over)Load in First Year Legal Research Instruction


The research and analysis that we teach our students are processes, but when our students’ grades are based primarily on the documents they produce, students can have a difficult time internalizing those processes. This is partially due to what cognitive psychologists refer to as cognitive load. Cognitive psychologists define cognitive load as “the mental burden that managing working memory imposes on a person.”[1] 

According to a 2015 law review article on cognitive load and legal writing:

"Cognitive load theorists opine that the process of learning complex new information can exhaust a student’s finite working memory, perhaps capable of holding as few as two or three elements at a time. The complexity of the ‘element interactivity’—the interaction between various elements of the material to be learned—alters cognitive load. Thus, the complicated process of analyzing legal problems, researching their possible solutions, and communicating that analysis in writing can overwhelm students’ working memories . . . ."[2]

The article describes three types of cognitive load:
  1. Intrinsic cognitive load: This is the mental burden essential to learning the materials at hand. 
  2. Extraneous cognitive load: This is the mental burden that is not intrinsic to learning the material at hand. It is often obstructs learning and is caused by poor instructional design.
  3. Germane cognitive load: A sub-type of intrinsic cognitive load, it's the mental burden that memory uses to develop the structures of long-term memory.[3]
As instructors, then, our job is to optimize learning by reducing the extraneous cognitive load. In first year legal research and writing courses, students may struggle to learn due to the broad variety of tasks being taught: research, writing, analysis, oral advocacy, negotiation, etc. Because students have so many tasks splitting their focus, they tend to focus on the product that is most immediate—usually some sort of graded writing assignment. This hampers their ability to learn the analytical process that is research, as they rush to simply gather sources they're "supposed to find" for their writing assignments. Students struggle to absorb the research process and the analysis that is critical to successful researching because their working memories are busy trying to communicate the information from the sources they have located, on which the majority of their grade will be determined. Additionally, even though we know legal research differs from the research most students have done earlier in their academic careers, the research in their first-year courses may feel the most familiar to them out of all the new skills they are learning. This may cause students to minimize the need to focus on legal research since they are struggling with so many even more foreign skills--especially if the importance of research skills is not emphasized in the class.

As research instructors, we must explain the import of giving students opportunities two distinct types of practice: 1) exercises to practice their bibliographic research skills—how to locate certain types of materials, separate from engaging in any analysis; and 2) assignments to practice the analytical process inherent to research without worrying about producing a written document. This might require a re-working of the curriculum. In most first year skills courses, we see two scenarios. In the first, instructors incorporate the bibliographic type of practice exercises because students must first and foremost know how to locate different types of materials. They don’t have time to focus on research analysis skills separate from students' writing assignments, causing students to struggle with the analytical side of research as they research their first open memo. In the second, instructors attempt to merge the two types of practice into one assignment, which may be too much for students to absorb cognitively. This may cause students to focus more on research as a gathering skill rather than as an analytical skill. It may be challenging to fit multiple research assignments into an already packed curriculum due to the overabundance of topics covered in 1L skills courses. But, given that studies show both that new attorneys will spend a considerable amount of their time conducting legal research and that their employers are unhappy with where their research skills currently stand, it’s time to advocate for making more room for research instruction. Including exercises that allow students to process both sets of researching skills separately will ultimately produce the kinds of researchers prospective employers want to hire.


[1] Terri L. Enns & Monte Smith, “Take a (Cognitive) Load Off: Creating Space to Allow First-Year Legal Writing Students to Focus on Analytical and Writing Processes,” 20 J. Legal Writing Institute 109, 110 (2015).
[2] Id. at 111.
[3] Id.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Why Experts Can Struggle to Teach Novices

This week in our Slack group on teaching , there was an interesting discussion about expertise and the amount of time needed to prep for instruction. I mentioned something that I recalled reading: that experts can be less effective in teaching novices because often the expert skips cognitive steps that the novice learner needs to understand.  I thought I'd dig into this a little more today on the blog. The fact is novices and experts learn very differently.  The major reason for this is that experts not only know a lot about their chosen discipline, but they understand how that discipline is organized. As such, what has a clear structure to the expert is a jumbled set of unorganized information to the novice.  The information presented to novices "are more or less random data points."[1]  In contrast, when the expert learns something new in her area of expertise, she just plugs it into the knowledge structure that already exists in her long-term memory. Because the new
Read more

Motivation in the Legal Research Classroom

Motivating students in the legal research classroom can be a challenge. As we know, there are many false narratives surrounding students' conceptions of legal research's importance, interest level, and ease, all of which can result in a decrease in students' motivation to engage in this subject matter. There are two types of motivation--intrinsic and extrinsic.  Extrinsic motivation occurs when students are motivated by an outside reward or punishment;[1] in instruction, this is often the grades students will get on research assignments or the participation points they might receive for actively engaging with in-class exercises.  Intrinsic motivation , on the other hand, occurs when students are interested in the topic for its own sake.[2] Due to legal research's false narratives, students entering our classrooms tend to be drive primarily by extrinsic motivation.  The problem is, as Julie Dirksen aptly notes in her excellent book Design for How People Learn , &qu
Read more

Helping With Student Focus & Motivation in the Remote Classroom, Part 3: Limiting New Technologies to Reduce Extrinsic Cognitive Load

A librarian colleague used to say to me, "Technology is great until it's not." This couldn't be more true in the classroom.  As many of us prepare for a fall entirely or partially online, there's a rush to familiarize ourselves with lots of new educational technology to teach our classes. There's this sense that if you're not using the best and newest ed tech in your class, you're doing something wrong. Fortunately, the science doesn't back this up.  Using too many different types of technology can be a contributing factor to cognitive overload in students . Cognitive load is a term cognitive psychologists use to describe the mental challenge that the limitations of working memory puts on a student's learning.[1] Basically, working memory is extremely limited in both time and duration. Humans can only hold on to between four and nine "chunks" of information at any given time,[2] and can only hold on to new information in their worki
Read more

Rethinking Formative Assessment

We've seen an increased significance placed on formative assessment in the legal academy. Standard 314 of the ABA Standards requires that law schools use both formative and summative assessment methods in their curriculum. Its rational for doing so is "to measure and improve student learning and provide meaningful feedback to students." The ABA defines formative assessment methods as "measurements at different points during a particular course or at different points over the span of a student's education that provide meaningful feedback to improve student learning." Those of us in the legal research instruction business are no strangers to formative assessment. We are leaders in this in the law school curriculum, with rarely a class going by in which students do not practice their skills. Lately, though, I've been wondering whether I'm going about formative assessment in the way that will best provide meaningful feedback to students. In the mandato
Read more

Reflection in the Legal Research Classroom

Reflection is a critical component of experiential learning.  We see in ABA Standard 303 that experiential courses must include multiple opportunities for self-evaluation.  Self-evaluation is critically important to legal research.  Students must reflect on and assess their research methodology each time they research to continue becoming more efficient legal researchers and to determine what research strategies work best in which situations. [1] Reflection relates to several ideas found in cognitive theory that have been shown to result in stronger learning and retention: Retrieval : recalling recently-learned information;  Elaboration : finding a nexis between what you know and what you are learning; and  Generation : putting concepts into your own words and/or contemplating what you might do differently next time. I've been contemplating how to better incorporate reflection into legal research classes. At the beginning of this semester, at the recommendation of a works
Read more