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John Sweller earned his Ph.D. in 1972, and has been lecturing and researching for 39 years. He has been Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, since 2006. His research reputation is associated with cognitive load theory, on which he began work in the early 1980s. He has authored and/or edited several special issues of various journals, and his research has been cited in academic articles, books and journals on over 6,000 occasions, with a rapidly increasing citation rate. He has graduated more than 40 doctoral students. He continues to collaborate on cognitive load theory with many individuals and groups.

John Sweller

Cognitive Load and Virtual Learning Environments

The solution to retaining your employees is a return to leadership practices.

The Great Resignation: What Cognitive Science Can Help You Do About It

Get your PowerPoint slides back to what they should be—a visual tool only.

Escape PowerPoint Purgatory

Where technology, content, interaction, and aesthetics unite to create a holistic user experience in a digital learning environment.

The Case for “Delight-enment”: UX in Learning Design

Margie Meacham reviews the concept of cognitive overload theory and offers some advice on how to avoid giving your learners too much information.

TMI! Cognitive Overload and Learning

How Information Becomes Long-Term Memory (and More Facts on Cognitive Load Theory)

ATD Blog

While facilitating leadership development workshops at Emerson (a Fortune 125 company with 90,000 employees in 140 countries), there is an interesting comment I frequently hear: “I did not realize how much time you would give me in this workshop to think!”Is that a compliment or a complaint? I believe most people mean it as a compliment because they are surprised. Most of them haven’t had enough time to think in prior trainings.I’ve heard this comment many times, and it never takes me by surprise. In fact, I would be disappointed if I did not hear it. Most learners aren’t given adequate time to think and reflect when they attend training sessions.Far too many training programs rely on content rather than application and do not offer learners time for intentional reflection. In my 28-year learning and development career, I’ve seen too many programs approach learning by telling learners as much as possible in the time provided. Many of us in L&D call that strategy “ten pounds of training in a five-pound sack.”Fred Harburg, former chief learning officer at Fidelity Investments, sums it up well: “If there is no time for reflection, there is almost no chance for improvement.”L&D professionals want to create value for learners. One of the most valuable activities we can build into the design and delivery of our courses is intentional reflection and implementation planning. To improve our training programs, we must stop talking and pushing content, and let learners think.This represents a paradigm shift for many L&D practitioners. Spend less time on content and more time on intentional thinking and reflection.L&D thought leaders Roy Pollock, Cal Wick, and Andy Jefferson (authors of The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning) popularized the term “learning scrap.” Learning scrap refers to content covered in a workshop that is never applied. Most L&D programs have a typical learning scrap rate of 85 percent. At best, most learners apply 15 percent of what’s taught in a workshop on the job. If you want to decrease learning scrap and increase learning transfer, build more deliberate thinking and reflection activities into your courses.In his classic book, Learning and Memory, Donald A. Norman writes, “To remember is to have managed three things successfully: the acquisition, the retention, and the retrieval of information. Failure to remember means failure at managing one of these three things.” I argue failure usually occurs at the retention level. If there is no reflection, there is no retrieval. If there is no reflection and retention, do not expect retrieval to follow.This issue is well-documented by Ruth C. Clark, Frank Nguyen, and John Sweller in another classic book, Efficiency in Learning. They refer to this concept as “information fatigue.” We need to give learners more time to process during a training program. The authors’ research shows a lack of time for reflection leads to cognitive overload. Overload implies a malfunction; learning is short-circuited. If a person attends a program to learn, and we cram it full of content without giving them time to think, it’s no wonder learning scrap occurs.Several years ago, I codeveloped a workshop with Michael Watkins (a former faculty member at Harvard Business School and founder of Genesis Advisers) to create a workshop based on his bestselling book, The First 90 Days. Our workshop designed intentional thinking activities that asked participants a series of questions at the end of each module. The reflection activities took between 20 and 30 minutes to complete and consisted of five or six questions. These were not simply recall or comprehension questions, but rather synthesis and evaluation questions (the higher levels of cognitive thinking).Some of the top executives who attended this workshop told me that if I had not built in deliberate time to think, their goal would have been to rush through the course so they could move on to the next thing on their list.Here are some ways to build time for reflection into your programs:
Build thinking time into the design and delivery of every learning program you create, no matter the delivery method (in person or virtual).Resist the temptation to add more content to your courses. Do not fall prey to the “myth of more.” More content at the expense of intentional time for reflection will not improve learner performance. It will diminish it.Remember, the goal is not to give the content. The goal is for learners to get it, which will only happen through the discipline of quiet reflection.If trainers are given the option to talk or let their learners think, many would choose to fill the silence with their own voices, but the greatest value trainers bring to a workshop is knowing when to stop speaking and give learners time to reflect.

Want Them to Learn? Give Them Time to Think

August 2009 - TD Magazine

The Many Faces of Cognitive Load Theory

The future of sales is changing every day. Customers need change. Perceptions of value fluctuate. Stakeholder dynamics are unpredictable. The environment is volatile, and sellers need to guide customers through the process of buying. But it's difficult when the processes sellers rely on have become rigid and inflexible. The answer? Embrace agility to prepare sellers to respond to changing requirements, lean into driving consensus, and visualize what they need to do to close more business.
During this event, you will learn:

How Agile principles equip sellers to respond and adjust based on changing customer requirements
The latest neuroscience and behavioral science research into how buyers buy and how sellers can be more effective at driving momentum
How sales methodology and sales enablement strategies intersect and the data needed to support and measure them


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