Modeling the Processes of How to Overcome Students’ Cognitive Overload if There is an Excessive Amount of the Material to Study
Abstract
The article considers an approach to the process of overcoming cognitive overwork analysis when students assimilate an excessive amount of educational information. We chose William Kermack and Anderson McKendrick’s SIR model as a mathematical model that can describe the process of overcoming cognitive overwork by a dynamic system in the form of a closed small study group; and then modified it by introducing new parameters characterizing the dynamics of the situation: coefficients of protection from cognitive overwork, susceptibility to cognitive overwork and overcoming cognitive overwork. The study of the SIR model was carried out in two ways, such as by constructing a time dependence of the replenishment of three SIR subgroups interacting with cognitive overwork by students (subjected, overcoming and overcome) as the situation develops, and using a phase plane that allows one to make a complete picture of the phenomenon and conduct a more detailed study of the general and particular conditions of the system’s movement to a state of equilibrium depending on the ratio between its parameters. The conducted research found out that both methods of analyzing the process of overcoming cognitive overwork based on the SIR model can be used as complementary, since each of them emphasizes individual factors affecting the development of the situation at different initial conditions.
The results obtained can be considered as necessary motivators for the further development of SIR modeling in the study of the influence and overcoming of destructive processes in assimilation of new knowledge.
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