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When trying to develop effective mental challenges for your students, bear in mind the cognitive limitations discussed in this chapter. For example, suppose you began a history lesson with a question: “You've read that 35 nations united to expel Iraq from Kuwait in the First Gulf War, the largest coalition since World War II. Why do you suppose so many nations joined?” Do your students have the necessary background knowledge in memory to consider this question? What do they know about the relationship of Iraq and neighboring countries that ended up joining the coalition prior to the war? Do they know about how Iraq brought their dispute with Kuwait to the Arab League before the invasion? Do they know about the significance of oil to the world economy and the forecast economic consequences of the invasion? Could they generate reasonable alternative courses of action for those countries leading the invasion? If they lack the appropriate background knowledge, the question you pose will quickly be judged as “boring.” If students lack the background knowledge to engage with a problem, save it for another time when they have that knowledge.

Equally important is the limit on working memory. Remember that people can keep only so much information in mind at once, as you experienced when you read the tea-ceremony version of the discs-and-pegs problem. Overloads of working memory are caused by such things as multistep instructions, lists of unconnected facts, chains of logic more than two or three steps long, and the application of a just-learned concept to new material (unless the concept is quite simple). The solution to working memory overloads is straightforward: slow the pace, and use memory aids such as writing on the whiteboard to save students from keeping too much information in working memory.