Jump-starting lectures

The concept of pre-laboratory activities is familiar to chemists. Students complete some work before the laboratory session with a view to familiarising themselves with an experimental technique or some underlying principles of the experiment. Therefore, more than most educators, it is not a big conceptual leap for chemists to consider pre-lecture activities in their teaching, with a similar purpose of preparing the mind of the learner.

The underlying pedagogy of pre-lecture activities is grounded in cognitive load theory (see box). As learners are exposed to new information, they process what they see and hear in the working memory. The amount of information – called the cognitive load – that can be processed is limited, and depends on the learner's prior knowledge. The more a learner knows about a subject, the easier it is to assimilate the newly acquired information into the long-term memory. Cognitive load theory provides a basis for describing how much new information should be presented (intrinsic load) and how this is presented (extraneous load) so that there is capacity for learning (germane load) to take place. For learners new to a topic or discipline, reducing the amount of new information presented in any single learning situation and presenting the information clearly, leaves more capacity for learning.