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[curriculum-eval] 05-agentic-workflows-intro.md: cognitive_load/active_learning — 1107-word step with under-measured activities

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
88/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
markdown
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Open workshop/05-agentic-workflows-intro.md and review the “Three key terms,” “Why This Matters,” Activity 1, and “check your prediction” sections. Shorten the specified explanatory prose, convert the two activities into checklist items, keep the existing checkpoint intact, and run npx --yes markdownlint-cli2 "**/*.md". Done means the file is closer to 800 words, the activities are measurable, and markdownlint passes.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

curriculum documentation quality

File: workshop/05-agentic-workflows-intro.md
Overall Score: 5.43 / 10.0 (corpus mean: 6.09)

Flagged Dimensions:

Dimension Score Benchmark Delta
cognitive_load 8.5 ≤ 800 words −0.9 (1107 words)
active_learning 2.4 density ≥ 3 −7.6 (density 0.72)

Note: checkpoint_quality is reported as 0.0/has_checkpoint: false, but that is caused by a confirmed tooling regex bug (see companion issue on curriculum_assessment.py) — this file has a well-formed ## :white_check_mark: Checkpoint with 6 checklist items plus a bonus "Still uncertain?" reveal. Excluded from this finding.

Root Cause (≤ 2 sentences):
At 1107 words this is one of the longest steps in Part 1 (307 words over the 800-word ideal), and although it contains three labeled "Activities," two of them ask the learner to write free text into a plain code fence rather than complete a trackable checklist item, so the activity-density metric (code blocks + checklist items per 100 words) undercounts the genuine interactivity already present.

Evidence (quoted from the file):

Activity 1 — identify the parts: Open any .lock.yml file in your repo and find the on: key. That is the compiled trigger that came from your frontmatter.
Task A: Run lint and unit tests on every pull request, fail if any check exits non-zero. ... Task B: Each morning, read all open issues, decide which look most urgent, and post a short triage summary.

Learning Science Rationale:
Mayer's coherence principle recommends removing extraneous material so working memory is devoted to essential content — the "two-file structure," "Activity 2 (agentic or standard)," and "Activity 3 (write a task brief)" sections each introduce their own diagram, worked example, and reveal block back-to-back, which is a lot of sequential detail for one step even though each individual activity is well constructed. Shortening explanatory prose around the diagrams (which already carry much of the "why," per the multimedia principle of not duplicating visual and textual channels) would recover word budget without losing the activities.

Improvement Prompt (for an agent):

Edit workshop/05-agentic-workflows-intro.md to bring word count closer to 800 and raise measurable activity density:

1. Shorten the prose paragraphs that restate what the diagrams already show (the "Three key terms" intro paragraph and the "Why This Matters" analogy paragraph) by roughly 100-150 words total, keeping the diagrams and tables as the primary explanation.
2. Convert "Activity 1 — identify the parts" and the "check your prediction" callout into explicit checklist items (- [ ] ...) so they count as trackable, verifiable actions, e.g.:
   - [ ] You opened a .lock.yml file and found the on: key
   - [ ] You correctly predicted both file names and which one Actions runs
3. Keep the existing ## :white_check_mark: Checkpoint section intact; do not reduce its checklist item count.
4. Re-run npx --yes markdownlint-cli2 "**/*.md" after editing.

Expected Score After Fix: 7.2 / 10.0

Generated by 🔬 Curriculum Quality Evaluator · copilot · auto · 84.8 AIC · ⌖ 7.78 AIC · ⊞ 9K · ◷

  • expires on Sep 27, 2026, 8:49 AM UTC
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