Sarah E. Silverman

I have recently been using two concepts to help instructors think about students’ experience in their classrooms that I would like to share more widely: Navigational load and interpretive load. Neither is my own original term, though I extend and apply both more broadly compared to their original usages.

Navigational load

In a digital learning environment, students must first find the materials they need before they can embark on learning tasks, and they must also successfully navigate between different digital tools, course formats, and security systems. We could call the labor that students undertake to navigate through the digital environment for the purpose of learning and coursework navigational load. Many instructors have named this to me as a major challenge for them and for their students, in that unwanted time is spent helping student find what they are looking for on university websites or in learning management systems. The WCAG 2.1 web accessibility guidelines emphasize consistency of layout and navigation, which is potentially a way of managing navigational load, but as the number of tools and environments that students are expected to navigate increases, consistent layout may not always eliminate navigational load.

While I view navigational load as a broadly useful term in understanding student experience, the term navigational load or burden is also sometimes used more specifically in accessibility discussions, especially for blind or visual users of informational technology (and educational technology). Researchers have used this term to describe digital elements which are particularly hard to navigate for blind users like tables and nested discussions (they have a high navigational load).

We might say that some contributors to navigational load are quite avoidable, like inaccessible web designs. Others, like the variation between instructors in how they set up and organize their course shells, involve tradeoffs. Attempting to standardize course layouts between courses may reduce navigational load, but limit the autonomy and creativity of the instructor.

Interpretive load

In an article discussing the role of transparency in AI policies related to assessment, Chahna Gonsalves defines interpretive load as “the cognitive, emotional, ethical, procedural and risk-management labour that students must undertake before they can begin a task.” While Gonsalves is writing specifically about the difficulty students can face while navigating AI policies, I believe we can extend this concept to the general labor students undertake while attempting to understand their instructors’ expectations for a learning task (written and unwritten, hidden and revealed, etc.). We could say that interpretive load is likely high for an assignment like a multi-part final project or a group activity in which different group members take on different tasks. Perhaps interpretive load is generally lower for an assignment such as a multiple choice quiz – while the content of the quiz questions may be challenging, how to complete the assignment is generally straightforward.

We could also say that interpretive load is the thing that transparent teaching practices (and the specific TILT framework) aim to “solve” or at the very least “reduce.” When interpretive load is high, students may spend precious time trying to understand the expectations and requirements of the assignment. Transparent teaching aims to communicate expectations as clearly and succinctly as possible, especially to support students who are less familiar with the norms and culture of higher education.

However, interpretive load can be a significant factor for students even when strong attempts at transparency have been made by instructors. For example, I have argued that differences in interpretation of instructions and expectations are an expected feature of neurodiverse classrooms because of differences in how people think and process information, and are not always something that needs to be minimized or solved. But how do we deal with situations in which the same assignment framing/directions results in a very different “interpretative load” for some students than others? This might relate to the modality, language, length etc. of the instructions.

Additionally, much like navigational load, many of the difficulties for students result from differences between instructors and what they expect of their students rather than from deficits in individual instructors’ communication or organization. Interpretive load may be something to draw our attention to and reduce in many circumstances, but also to accept as unavoidable in some others. We can also apply “tolerance for error” to minimize the negative consequences of interpretive missteps that may occur.