How to use Atomi to beat cognitive overload

As an educator, you’re working hard to get students up to speed on course content ahead of important assessment milestones. But when it comes to achieving mastery, preventing cognitive overload needs to be a top priority.  

You have plenty on your plate, from marking to providing feedback and planning engaging lessons across multiple year groups and subjects. But managing each student’s cognitive load can feel like another task to add to your to-do list. 

That’s why you need the right support in your corner to streamline the process of class planning, assessing progress and assigning tailored revision resources. With Atomi, you’ll gain a single consolidated teaching and learning platform that prioritises cognitive load theory by design. 

In this article, we’ll explore:

• What is cognitive overload, and what causes it?
• Why combatting cognitive overload matters
• 3 ways Atomi beats cognitive overload by design 

What is cognitive overload?

To deeply understand how cognitive load (and cognitive overload) works, we first need to cover the role memory plays in learning. To process new information, students need to be able to move concepts from their short-term (or working memory) to their long-term memory. 

While working memory is fast and agile at recalling information, only long-term memory can store information for extended periods of time. To effectively apply information and put new knowledge to use, students need to be able to use their short-term and long-term memory together. 

And here’s where cognitive overload comes in. If students are presented with too much new, complex information at once, it can be difficult for learners to move this knowledge from their working memory to long-term memory. 

In a nutshell, cognitive overload occurs when students are overloaded with too many concepts at once. Think of it like trying to watch TV, listen to a podcast and read a dense chapter of a textbook all at the same time—it’s impossible to stay focused and absorb what’s in front of you. 

• Learners are trying to process too much information at the same time
• If the information presented is very complex
• If the learner is encountering distractions in their learning environment

Why combatting cognitive overload matters

In classrooms, presenting too much complex, non-linear information to students is too much for learner’s working memory to process—leading to cognitive overload.

This can cause knowledge gaps, where students only retain half of a topic or confuse and misinterpret instructions. Plus, if students are overwhelmed in the early stages of learning, they won’t be able to move this information from their working memory to long-term memory either—making it hard to store, retain and recall this information at a later date, too. 

As a result, cognitive load theory has been developed as a way to help educators deliver instructions that help learners absorb and retain new knowledge effectively. 

But here’s where things get a bit more nuanced. Other researchers have found that sticking to cognitive load theory alone can present challenges for educators, particularly when keeping students engaged. 

A big part of beating cognitive overload is using techniques like explicit instruction. But here’s the catch: doing repetitive tasks and worked examples over and over again is only shown to be most helpful when students are novices in a topic. However, it can have the reverse effect once a student has reached mastery. 

Once someone has automated or become fluent in the core skills and knowledge, then explicit instruction actually becomes demotivating. It’s called the “expertise reversal effect”, and that is if you keep banging on with explicit highly structured teaching when someone’s got a key concept. This can cause the student to become disengaged and think, “I’ve got it, you don’t have to keep repeating it”.
- Andrew Martin, Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of New South Wales

So, what’s the solution? Researchers have developed a new theory that captures the best bits of explicit instruction and cognitive load theory while boosting its effectiveness for all students. It’s called Load Reduction Instruction (LRI) theory. 

In short, LRI theory guides students through complex information and delivers content in manageable, bite-sized chunks. Then, once students have automated those skills and knowledge, they’re challenged to engage in guided independent learning, allowing learners to apply this information in new, interesting ways. 

No matter which theory your school follows, the overarching takeaway message is the same: complex information needs to be delivered in manageable chunks for students to move this knowledge from their short-term to long-term memory. 

3 ways Atomi beats cognitive overload by design 

Creating engaging, dynamic lessons that manage student’s cognitive load doesn’t have to be complex or time-consuming. In fact, cognitive load theory is embedded into every element of Atomi’s platform.

Rather than cobbling together a patchwork of single-use edtech tools, Atomi’s all-in-one platform gives teachers and students access to engaging curriculum-aligned content. With just one set of login credentials, students can access bite-sized videos, interactive quizzes and personalised revision tools ready to use both in the classroom and at home. 

For educators, Atomi ensures consistency across departments and empowers teachers with the resources needed to prepare in-class activities, hands-on experiments or differentiated instructions in just a few clicks. Plus, short snappy videos and chunking of information ensure learners are never overwhelmed or overloaded with too much information at once, either. 

Let’s dive into three practical ways Atomi’s platform helps teachers to reduce cognitive load for students to drive strong academic performance and engagement across entire cohorts. 

1. Create great learning experiences with interactive lessons

Lesson structure is key to combatting cognitive overload for students. Atomi’s interactive lessons take the guesswork out of planning the sequence and delivery of content. Capped at just 10 to 15 minutes, each lesson is aligned to your subject’s curriculum, perfect for either an in-class activity or a revision task for homework. 

Each interactive lesson uses lesson aims, checkpoints and summaries to introduce difficult concepts in clear, simple and approachable language. Plus, students move through a variety of content formats, from short videos, to snappy explainer text and engaging visuals to make it easy to grasp new concepts.

Plus, you can use a variety of multiple-choice questions, drag-and-drop questions and exact answer questions to test understanding throughout the lesson, too. 

With over 1,500+ bite-size video lessons ready for you to deploy flexibly into your lesson plans, designing engaging learning experiences that combat cognitive overload has never been easier. 

Atomi Tip: Want to track the performance of your students? Assign interactive lessons as tasks in Atomi, allowing you to personalise the learning experience for each student. From there, you can use individual lesson progress reports, your class mark book or Atomi Insights to gain real-time data into how they’re tracking. 

2. Simplify teaching workflows in a single platform

Tracking student’s progress is key to building engaging lessons that slowly ramp up in complexity. But tracking the performance of students manually at a whole class level can be tedious and time-consuming. 

If you’re ready to ditch offline spreadsheets, Atomi is here to deliver meaningful, real-time insights that simplify your teaching workflows. 

Think of Atomi as your consolidated one-stop-shop for lesson planning, tracking progress, assigning revision resources and more. With hundreds of curriculum-aligned videos at your fingertips, you introduce new, challenging concepts to students in a clear, engaging way. 

Plus, you can save hours on assigning revision tasks with the ability to set custom follow-up resources and content based on how students perform in quizzes and topic-based tests. 

Take this example: Mark book gives you the ability to drill down on individual student performance as well as gain class-wide trends to pinpoint how well learners have mastered course content—and inform where you focus their attention moving forward. 

3. Tap into powerful intelligence with Atomi AI

The sooner students receive feedback, the sooner they can take practical steps to focus their revision efforts on where it matters most. 

With Atomi AI, gaining instant personalised feedback is a reality for students. By tapping into powerful auto-marking tools, students can quickly help students identify where they might have gone wrong and how to improve. 

Our team has worked hard to ensure the AI feedback delivered to students is clear, helpful and encouraging. In fact, Atomi AI has been carefully trained, evaluated and tested in the context of hundreds of millions of questions answered on Atomi. This ensures it reliably delivers helpful feedback and meets the expectations of our teaching community. 

By shortening this feedback loop, students can quickly identify areas of opportunity and dive straight into revision resources that are tailored to their strengths and weaknesses. 

Want to boost student engagement across your department?

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