Led by:

Sarah Blissett, MD

Dr. Blissett is a Clinical Fellow in the Department of Medicine. She started the Adult Congenital Heart Disease fellowship in July 2018. Concurrent with her Cardiology (Western University, Canada) and Integrated Cardiac Imaging (McGill University, Canada) fellowships, she completed a Masters of Health Professions Education from Maastricht University. She is interested in medical education research, particularly in optimizing instructional design and clinical decision-making.

Description:

While workplace learning environments provide authentic tasks to promote learning, elements of clinical settings may distract trainees and may impede learning. Applying principles of Cognitive Load Theory to optimize workplace learning environments by managing intrinsic load (complexity of the task matched to learner knowledge and/or skill), minimizing extraneous load (any aspect that is not part of task completion) and promoting germane load (processing for storage in long-term memory) would be advantageous once the sources of cognitive load in the workplace are known. This talk uses a cardiology training setting as an example to explore the trainee perspective of the aspects of the workplace learning environment that contribute to intrinsic, extraneous and germane load and how we can use these findings to optimize cognitive load in the workplace learning environment.

At the end of this presentation participants will be able to:

Describe sources of intrinsic, extraneous and germane cognitive load in the workplace learning environment.
List possible interventions to optimize cognitive load in the workplace learning environment.