By Paul Venderley
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has no chapter breaks. The prose moves, page after page, so that by page200, you feel some faint echo of the weariness his characters felt.
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is also delivered in a single continuous sweep of prose, but while the novel unfolds as a single day, the chiming of Big Ben tells the reader that time has moved—without ever interrupting the flow of the novel itself.
Psychologists have a name for what Woolf’s chime is doing. It’s called an event boundary: a point at which the brain decides that one stretch of experience has ended and a new one has begun.
Event Segmentation Theory (EST) holds that the mind constantly forecasts what’s about to happen based on what’s happening now. When something violates the forecast, the brain updates its model of “what’s going on right now.” That update is the event boundary.
EST explains why a boundary gets registered at all. It doesn’t explain what happens to the contents of your mind the moment that boundary is crossed.
You’ve likely felt this yourself.
You walk into a kitchen with a clear purpose, and by the time you’re standing in it, that purpose is gone. One explanation for this, the Event Horizon Model, treats this as a deliberate act rather than a glitch. We actively forget in order to clear our working memory of prior context to make room for whatever the new context requires. The brain is doing its job.
This appears to present a Catch-22.
Build an event boundary into training content, and you risk triggering the very flush that clears out the content your module just covered.
But without event boundaries, nothing tells working memory to consolidate what it just processed. New material piles on top of old material. Learners click forward, see new content, and feel like they’re progressing, even as their working memory quietly saturates.
I’m going to toss another concept into this mix. Left alone, your brain will chunk a lengthy stretch of anything—a lecture, a training module, an unbroken novel—into discrete events whether you help it or not. This spontaneous segmentation happens unconsciously. In an unsegmented training module, working memory fills up, flushes where the brain observes a change in context (whether it lines up with anything conceptually meaningful or not), then fills up again. Which makes it important for us to chime in at the moment where an event segment ends.
Strategic Pause
See what I did there? An article header can set an event boundary. In this case, we’re establishing a boundary between theory and proposed solutions.
How do we set event boundaries into our training modules without triggering the flush that erases what was just taught? Four familiar instructional design techniques do this work.
1. Topic/Subtitle Screen
Research on event boundaries has found that the more swiftly we are given new information, the less of a chance we have to consolidate whatever just happened. By adding a brief pause to mark the transition, recall for the surrounding content improved compared to recall of uncued material.
A subtitle screen is a potential way to give the brain time to consolidate information. A title card doesn’t compete for the same cognitive resources that new content would.
However, this is the most passive of our event boundaries. In training modules, our learners may need more support. The brain is alert when at the event boundary, actively deciding what to forget and what to retain. A pause helps, but not enough.
2. Pose a Question
What if we were to establish a clear link that ensures that the learner is able to connect the relevance of old to new? By posing a question to the learner, we can create a link to the next section.
The question serves two purposes: It reminds the learners what’s important about the previous segment and it helps ensure that the next topic is related to the previous one.
3. Story/Case Study
A story gives learners an opportunity to move information into long-term memory while linking relevance.
The more situational features shift at once, the more strongly people perceive an event boundary occurring. A scenario stacks several signals: a shift in location from classroom to workplace, a shift in character from module narrator to employee, a shift in goal from “understanding a concept” to “solve this problem.”
As with posing the question, storytelling provides you with an opportunity to link upcoming content with past content. Characters can begin with familiar settings and then be exposed to new challenges that get explored in the next course segment.
4. Knowledge Check
At some point during a lengthy lecture at school, you or one of your classmates may have raised your hand to ask: “Will this be on the test?” Far from being a troublesome student, this person was evincing the skills necessary to help their brain decide what to move into long-term memory and what to set aside.
When you strategically build knowledge checks into your course, you answer the learners’ question about what’s important to recall, which gives their brains a clear signal about what’s worth encoding. Immediate testing after reading a prose passage prompts the brain to actively retrieve the information from that passage, producing substantially stronger long-term retention than simply re-reading or reviewing the same material again.
A caveat: When designers build knowledge checks simply to confirm that a learner has reached a specific milestone, the interaction becomes as passive as a subtitle screen. Solid, conscientious question remediation may provide greater ROI at an event boundary than any other learning engagement tool or interactivity practice.
Your Design Can Maximize Boundaries
Somewhere in your next course, a boundary is going to happen whether you design it or not. You have the opportunity to maximize this tool, turning it into an active mechanism for learner retention.
Chime in with a deliberate boundary, and you’re directing the learner’s brain to consolidate important material and make room for new content the learner needs.
Use Evidence-Based Strategies to Improve Learning Design
Join Paul Venderley and other speakers at the Evidence-Informed Design online conference, October 14–15. Keynoter Nidhi Sachdeva will kick things off with a discussion of cognitive architecture as a foundation for evidence-based learning design. Think Spaces offer opportunities to interact with speakers and fellow attendees. And, in addition to hearing from Paul Venderley about using feedback to boost learner retention, you’ll learn to write clearer narration, build reflection and practice into learning, and explore why reducing extraneous load is essential.
Register now; online conferences are free if you are a Professional or Enterprise member!
Image credit: ribkhan
