A Handy Summary of Memory Definitions, for Teachers and Students

Here‘s a quick summary of information about memory: sensory memory, working memory, long-term memory, and (crucially!) forgetting.

Author Steven Turner presents this brisk overview to combat “buzzword wasteland.” He fears the education-world habit of coming up with fancy new terms every six months or so. Rather than scamper after every new fad, he’d like us to focus on the enduring basics.

Like: memory.

I myself think of “sensory memory” as a part of our attentional systems. As long as teachers remember the key point — students have VERY little perceptual capacity for incoming sensory information — it doesn’t really matter what we call it.

The information on this page might all be review. However, as we know well, spaced repetition helps learning. A chance to rethink these topics right now will be beneficial to our understanding.