Learning requires metacognition, but environments can take some of that metacognitive burden off of learners’ shoulders.
In a classroom setting, teachers do much of the monitoring, evaluation, planning, and executive control. Of course, they sometimes do too much of it, but in many situations, this can free students to focus on the material at hand.
On Quantum Country, our interleaved review sessions help readers notice when they’re not absorbing the material and give them a sense of ease when their memory is solid. The environment also plans and executes subsequent memory practice accordingly.
Games are particularly good at this:
When moving through a game, you usually don’t have to guess about whether you’re ready to move onto something else, or where you should go: the game will let you know (perhaps implicitly).
Sometimes, there’s a strict sequence of levels which must be solved in order. Making a plan is trivial; see Fine-grained task progressions as cognitive scaffolding.
More subtly, you may find that a boss battle depends on your ability to use a bow and arrow. The dungeon exits are sealed, so there’s nowhere else to go. So you conclude the obvious: you’ll need to get better at the bow until you can defeat the boss. In a different game, you might find that you miss sometimes with the bow and arrow, but there’s always a path forward available, at least for now. So you don’t need to work on improving your archery, unless you specifically want to.
Even in an open-world game, game designers use proximity and affective design to ensure that at least one appealing and appropriate destination is always salient. If you set out in a direction where the challenge is too great, the game will make it clear that you should adapt your plans, and it will present an obvious alternative avenue.
In sum, all this means that players can focus on the action—not on trying to figure out what they should do next. This contrasts Most explanatory media make participants run their own feedback loops.
Learning requires metacognition. When learning something new from a text, readers must constantly ask themselves: did I understand that? what questions can I ask myself to check my understanding? should I reread that passage? should I consult a reference for background on that? etc.
In other words, readers have to run their own feedback loops. When readers are focused on challenging object-level material, they may not be able to effectively perform this kind of metacognition; conversely, too much effort spent on evaluation, planning, and executive control may make it difficult to engage with difficult object-level material.
The situation is perhaps slightly worse in video formats. In books, readers are in complete control of the pace, but in videos, there’s a default pace, and viewers must actively decide to subvert it.
My theory as to why this is true: Metacognitive supports require dynamic, participatory environments.
Matuschak, A. (2019). Why books don’t work. Retrieved from https://andymatuschak.org/books