Overtisation

Overtising the steps - how to further manage cognitive load when chaining atoms

Podcast is AI generated. Interactive transcript coming soon.

Overtisation makes things ‘overt,’ rather than ‘covert.’ Clear and obvious rather than hidden away in our minds. It reveals our thinking to students and reveals their thinking to us.

There are two main types of overtisation.

One type is to overtise symbols, what I call ‘revealing the secrets.’ Another is to overtise the steps in a cognitive routine. This second type is what we’re going to look at here.

So far, we have atomised the cognitive routine like this:

And we have talked about managing the cognitive load associated with chaining the atoms by practising sub-chains before attempting the full chain, for example like this:

Or like this:

In all three examples the steps you have to take are covert.

We can make them more overt like this…