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[curriculum-eval] 05-agentic-workflows-intro.md: cognitive_load — over word-count budget despite strong activities #3182

Description

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File: workshop/05-agentic-workflows-intro.md
Overall Score: 5.43 / 10.0 (corpus mean: 6.15)

Flagged Dimensions:

Dimension Score Benchmark Delta
cognitive_load 8.5 ≤800 words 1,107 words (+307 over)
active_learning 2.4 density ≥3 0.72 (2 code blocks + 6 checklist items / 1,107 words)
checkpoint_quality 0.0* ≥4 items *tooling false-negative (see corpus scorecard)

Root Cause (≤ 2 sentences):
This page is 1,107 words — 307 over the 800-word cognitive-load ideal — and, despite containing three well-designed reveal-based activities ("Activity 1," "Activity 2: agentic or standard?," "Activity 3: write a task brief"), the automated activity-density metric only counts fenced code blocks (2) and checklist items (6), so the five <details>/reveal interactions that make up the page's actual pedagogical core are invisible to the density score, understating how interactive the page already is while its raw length still drags cognitive_load down.

Evidence (quoted from the file):

Task A: Run lint and unit tests on every pull request, fail if any check exits non-zero.

Reveal Task A answer **Standard Actions workflow.** Every run follows the same fixed steps. No judgment required.

Learning Science Rationale:
Mayer's segmenting principle recommends breaking longer instructional content into learner-paced segments; this page already does that reasonably well via its <details> reveals, but at 1,107 words of surrounding prose (three key terms table, two-file-structure explanation, three separate diagrams) it still exceeds the point where Sweller's CLT predicts working-memory overload for a single continuous page, especially for a "core path" step near the beginning of the workshop where learners have the least prior schema to offload new terms onto.

Improvement Prompt (for an agent):

Open workshop/05-agentic-workflows-intro.md. At 1,107 words (ideal ≤800), this
early core-path page front-loads three diagrams, a terms table, and a two-file
explanation before its three well-designed reveal activities. Trim length
without removing the interactive `<details>` activities, which are the
strongest part of the page:

1. Shorten the "The two-file structure" section: the two bullet points
   describing the `.md` source file and `.lock.yml` compiled file repeat
   information already shown in the accompanying diagram's alt text. Cut the
   bullets to one sentence each, keeping the "GitHub Actions runs this file,
   not the `.md`" distinction since it's tested in the Checkpoint.
2. In "Three key terms," remove the sentence "For a full glossary, see Side
   Quest: Agentic Workflows Deep Dive" and instead add that link inline next
   to the table caption—this is a 1-line trim, not a content change.
3. Combine "Activity 2: agentic or standard?" intro paragraph with the
   preceding diagram's caption instead of repeating similar framing language
   twice.
4. Do not remove any of the three `<details>` activities, the diagrams, or the
   Checkpoint section — they are the page's load-bearing interactive content.
5. Target a final word count of 850-900 words.
6. Run `npx --yes markdownlint-cli2 "**/*.md"` after editing and fix any lint
   errors before finishing.

Expected Score After Fix: 6.2 / 10.0

Generated by 🔬 Curriculum Quality Evaluator · copilot · auto · 142.5 AIC · ⌖ 18.6 AIC · ⊞ 9.5K ·

  • expires on Sep 11, 2026, 3:49 PM UTC

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