Every so often, someone who knows I’m a fan of Cognitive Load Theory brings up its collaborative line of inquiry — Collaborative Cognitive Load Theory. They’ve stumbled on it and wondered what I think. So, you’d think I’d be a big believer in the benefits of collaboration. After all, one of the main researchers in … Continue reading The Escape Room Problem With Collaborative Cognitive Load Theory
Every so often, someone who knows I’m a fan of Cognitive Load Theory brings up its collaborative line of inquiry — Collaborative Cognitive Load Theory. They’ve stumbled on it and wondered what I think. So, you’d think I’d be a big believer in the benefits of collaboration. After all, one of the main researchers in this area, Paul Kirschner, also wrote the foreword to my book.
But when you look closely at how those studies are designed, things get interesting.
In my mind, these studies work a bit like an Escape Room. Because there’s too much information to hold in working memory, participants naturally distribute the load — one person remembers the numbers, another holds Clue A, another Clue B, and so on. Under those conditions, collaboration makes perfect sense.
The catch is that tasks have to be really unusual to produce that effect, just like in an Escape Room. Most of what we teach in classrooms doesn’t create that kind of interdependence. Even the researchers who design these studies acknowledge that what they’re studying isn’t much like real teaching. Here’s how one paper, retrieved by Greg Ashman, put it:
“It should be noted that the learning conditions in this study were designed to optimise collaboration. This creates tension between ecological validity and experimental validity. The learning environment differed from settings encountered in ‘real’ education in that all collaborating participants received only part of the unique information elements and, consequently, were required to exchange information to solve the problems or study the worked examples. Also, participants were not allowed to offload their WMs by using pencil and/or pen and paper while learning, which also might have stimulated them to collaborate. Finally, the learning setting was highly structured and scripted causing a minimal cognitive investment with respect to transactional activities. In this sense, it is not clear to what extent the results obtained in this study can be generalised to real classroom settings.”
That’s the authors themselves saying: we designed a setting so artificial it might not generalize to school at all. I actually talked to Paul Kirschner about this the first time he was on the podcast.
And that last line — “minimal cognitive investment with respect to transactional activities” — is really the key. Because the biggest problem with collaboration isn’t the idea of sharing memory load; it’s transactional cost.
Working together sounds efficient, but it rarely is. You want to do it your way, I want to do it mine. We have to pause to explain ourselves, reconcile different strategies, and constantly check for understanding. Add in the social tension of one student doing most of the work while another coasts, and you have what psychologists call social loafing — the natural diffusion of responsibility that creeps in when a task is shared. The more you account for these costs, the less efficient collaboration becomes.
So for me, if students are doing a scripted escape game where you’re not allowed to write anything down, then collaboration might help. But for almost everything else we design, Direct and Explicit Instruction is the better way to go. It manages cognitive load, ensures everyone learns the material, and doesn’t depend on distributed memory simulations.
That said, there is a place where peer-assisted learning seems to work: Precision Teaching. It’s peer-to-peer timed practice — fast, structured, motivating — and it captures the social energy of collaboration without the cognitive or transactional drag. Its cousin you may have heard of, Spring Math, has operationalized MTSS in a way that nobody else has. I think it could be a great option for schools struggling with weak core programs or widespread foundational skill gaps.
If you want to see what that looks like, check out:
My interview with Spring Math founder, Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden
