title: Twelve tips for medical curriculum design from a cognitive load theory perspective.
abstract: During their course, medical students have to become proficient in a variety of competencies. For each of these competencies, educational design can use cognitive load theory to consider three dimensions: task fidelity: from literature (lowest) through simulated patients (medium) to real patients (highest); task complexity: the number of information elements in a learning task; and instructional support: from worked examples (highest) through completion tasks (medium) to autonomous task performance (lowest). One should integrate any competency into a medical curriculum such that training in that competency facilitates the students' journey that starts from high instructional support on low-complexity low-fidelity learning tasks all the way to high-complexity tasks in high-fidelity environments carried out autonomously. This article presents twelve tips on using cognitive load theory or, more specifically, a set of four tips for each of task fidelity, task complexity, and instructional support, to achieve that aim.
authors.affiliation: a Maastricht University , the Netherlands .
authors.forename: Jimmie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Leppink
authors.affiliation: b University of Newcastle , Australia.
authors.forename: Robbert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Duvivier
mesh_terms: D002983:Clinical Competence; D003071:Cognition; D003479:Curriculum; D004501:Education, Medical / Q000458:organization & administration* / Q000592:standards; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D017145:Models, Educational; D011582:Psychological Theory