Achieving Optimal Best: A Focus of Inquiry from the Perspective of Cognitive Load Imposition
A School of Education seminar presented on August 15th, 2018 by Associate Professor Huy Phan and Dr Bing Ngu
Achievement of optimal best reflects personal experience of flourishing and an internal state of intrinsic motivation. Optimal best coincides with the paradigm of positive psychology (M. Seligman, 2010; M.E. Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) and is concerned with the maximization of a person’s cognitive, emotional, physical, and social functioning. One research inquiry that has received considerable interest relates to an explanatory account of how a person achieves optimal best. In this seminar, we want to share our research undertakings, which focus on theorizations, methodological conceptualisations, and empirical development of the concept of optimal best (e.g. Phan, Ngu, Wang, Shih, Shi & Lin, 2018; Phan, Ngu & Yeung, 2017). Our examination of instructional designs as potential optimising agencies for effective mathematics learning is based on John Sweller’s cognitive load theory. We discuss the extent to which cognitive load imposition (e.g. Ngu & Phan, 2016; Ngu, Phan, Hong & Hasbee, 2016) could explain a person’s optimal best and/or sub-optimal best.
