Challenges in applying principles from cognitive science to the design of a school mathematics curriculum

Abstract

There are increasingly frequent calls for school mathematics curricula to be informed by robust research evidence. One approach to achieving this is designing evidence‐informed learning and teaching resources for the classroom. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences of designing a free and fully resourced complete set of secondary mathematics curriculum materials. We explore in detail the challenges we have encountered in our attempts to apply principles from the cognitive theory of multimedia learning. We focus on tensions we have experienced when simultaneously applying multiple principles and balancing these with other educational considerations. Specifically, we consider trade‐offs between redundancy versus clarity, seductive details versus richness, personalisation and emotional design versus abstraction, spatial contiguity and signalling versus parsimony, and pre‐training and worked examples versus exploration. We examine the choices and dilemmas we faced, and illustrate our emerging attempts to resolve these tensions through presenting multiple examples from our design work. We conclude with recommendations about how tensions among these design principles might be navigated in curriculum design and we suggest possible avenues for further research in this area.