When I was trying to understand the concept of cognitive load, I found that learning the concept itself is an intrinsic cognitive load for me. I had a strong feeling of “learning slowly” or “learning without fully understanding” as an international student. My brain needs to process the linguistic understanding every time before the terminology understanding. To avoid this condition, I always prepare lessons before class. If I cannot understand something new in a very short time, then do some preparation before class.
When students have trouble comprehending ideas or concepts, they usually seeking for visual aids. I found this video on YouTube, and it helps me greatly in understanding the concepts with its visual metaphor. Learning things through human brains is like planting trees. It is easy to add new branches under the existing ones but very hard to plant a new tree. As long as students can link their knowledge to the previous class, they will have an affordable cognitive load for their learning behaviours.
This semester, I selected the course CSC 411 Information Visualization as one of my main courses. I think the technic I learned from CSC 411 is really helpful for me to create visual aids in pedagogy study. The sketch note above shows a simple process to create a good graph. There are many details inside each step, but for a beginner, it is enough to understand the basic process of visual design.