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Obsessed with Working Memory: Identifying Overload
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

To review earlier posts in this series:

You can define working memory.

You can explain why it’s so important.

You can anticipate WM overload even before it happens.

In this post, we’ll see how you can identify WM overload when it does happen.

“Wait…Back Up A Step…”

Why should you even want to identify WM overload when it happens?

After all, the last post was about anticipating it. If teachers can predict when WM overload might happen, shouldn’t we just prevent it every time?

That’s a reasonable question. The answer is: not exactly.

First: students have different levels of WM capacity. So, you might anticipate overload for most of your students. But you might not get the level of WM challenge exactly right every time.

Second: you want to nudge up against WM boundaries from time to time. Remember (as we’ve discussed in MANY posts), some level of desirable difficulty improves learning.

One way to raise difficulty is to increase the WM challenge. If you don’t test WM boundaries every now and then, you might not be challenging your students enough.

And, when you do test those boundaries, you’re likely to edge over that boundary from time to time.

Going beyond WM limits is a normal part of teaching. Doing so isn’t a terrible thing.

But: doing so without a) realizing it, and b) fixing it right away — now THAT’S a terrible thing.

“Okay, How Do I Identify WM Overload?”

The easy method. Look at the student’s face. If you see a desolately blank stare, you know what just happened: WM crash.

For fun, watch this video. Unless you’re a biology teacher, you’ll feel your WM curl up like a tiny helpless rodent. You might hear it whimper. Go look in the mirror. THAT’S the face you’re looking for.

“Are There Harder Methods?”

Sure.

Working memory is a cognitive system that holds and processes information. When students struggle to do both at the same time, THAT’S WM overload.

Some examples will clarify.

If I tell students to follow these 6 instructions, they have to a) HOLD all six instructions, and b) PROCESS them one-at-a-time. If they can’t do that, that’s WM overload.

Or,

If students can’t gather information from several websites into one Word document, they’re struggling to a) PROCESS the logic of the work their doing, while b) HOLDING their place in that logic.

Or, here’s one you see almost every day.

A student raises her hand. I say: “wait just a moment,” and finish a sentence or two. When I come back to her and say “what’s your question,” she looks abashed. Sheepishly, she admits: “I forgot.”

In this case, my student had to HOLD her question. And, she had to PROCESS new information: the sentence or two that I spoke. That combination went beyond her WM limits.

Or, this one used to make me CRAZY:

A student raises his hand. I say: “wait just a moment,” and remind the class that the paper is due Friday at 3 pm, in the box outside my office.

When I come back to that student and say “what’s your question,” he earnestly asks: “When is the paper due, and where should I turn it in?”

I used to get SO MAD at that student.

But now I know, I overloaded his WM. He was HOLDING his question so hard that he couldn’t PROCESS the information I was giving. (Joseph, if you’re reading this blog, I apologize.)

Once you start looking for them, you’ll see holding while processing problems all the time.

When you see those problems, you know that your students have run out of WM.

“Got It. Anything Else?”

Let’s do one more.

Human working memory systems necessarily interact with our attention systems.

If your students are not paying attention in a way that surprises you, you might have a WM problem, not an attention problem.

That is: if you think to yourself, “They’re usually so focused during 2nd period. I wonder what’s going on today? They’re kinda off the wall… ,” stop and consider the WM demands of the work they’re doing.

They might be exhibiting an attentional symptom of a working memory problem.

Up Next: SOLUTIONS

We’ve spent lots of time ANTICIPATING and IDENTIFYING working memory problems.

In the next two posts, I’ll FINALLY talk about solving those problems.

Obsessed with Working Memory: Anticipating Overload
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

We know what working memory is.

We know that we absolutely must work within the working memory capacity that our students have.

How, exactly, do we do that?

To develop our expertise, we must constantly ask these three questions:

First: As I look at my lesson plan, my syllabus, my test, my classroom, can I ANTICIPATE working memory overload?

Second: As I teach my class, can I IDENTIFY WM overload when it happens?

Third: How do I best MITIGATE or SOLVE those WM problems?

Today, let’s focus on ANTICIPATE.

#1: Information Processing

To anticipate WM overload, we should first look for places that require unusually high amounts of information processing.

Does this lesson include LOTS of new information? (Lots = “more than I usually do with this age group.”)

Does the lesson require students to put information together in new ways?

For instance: I’m working at a summer camp right now, and the assistant director told me about a lesson he had observed. A counselor was showing campers how to use a cook stove. To do so, he took about 20 minutes to show them all the steps involved.

GOOD NEWS: He showed the campers the steps correctly.

BAD NEWS: To use a cook stove, campers needed to learn lots of new information (what is a “valve regulator”?).

And, they needed to put all that information together into a new mental system.

12-year-olds simply can’t take in — and combine — that much new information. And: it’s easy to anticipate that problem.

#2: Dark Sides of the Force

As any Jedi Knight will tell you, the Force isn’t a problem. MISUSE of the Force is a problem.

So too, these two things I’m about to list aren’t bad. But, if we’re not careful about their use, we might overwhelm working memory.

Instructions: Of course, instructions help students do necessary steps, and can help them learn.

But, to follow instructions, students must remember them (that’s “holding”), and the follow them (that’s “reorganizing” and “combining”).  So, following instructions take lots of WM.

If your students seem to get lost while following even simple steps, try giving just one instruction, and letting them finish that before they get the next. (More solutions in a later post.)

Choices: Choices can motivate students, and so facilitate learning.

But, when a student faces cognitive struggles, choices ADD TO WM burdens.

For example:

A student might come to me and say: “I hate this sentence — it sounds so awkward. How do I make it better?”

I could say: “Well, try using an active verb. Or, reduce the number of prepositional phrases. Or, use parallelism to organize the logic. Or, use subordination to vary the rhythm.”

Now, each one of those suggestions has merit. But, too many choices just might make the thinking harder, not easier.

#3 Don’t Miss the Obvious

Tired students have lower WM capacity. So: teenagers can do better work at 10 am than at 8 am.

Over-Stressed students have lower WM capacity. We do want students to face challenges, but not challenges they don’t think they can overcome.

Grand Recap

To ANTICIPATE WM overload:

Review your lesson plans and assessments to be sure they don’t include too much new information, or too many new combinations of information.

Look out for too many instructions and too many choices.

Pay attention to students’ energy level and stress level.

Notice, by the way, that these guidelines necessarily call on your teacherly instincts and experience.

I can say: “don’t give too many instructions,” but how many is too many? As a 5th grade math teacher, you’ll know that … well … that lesson plan had too many.

But, tomorrow’s LP has fewer instructions. Or, perhaps it has simpler instructions. The same number of instructions, if they’re simpler, might just solve the problem.

Research can’t answer that question. Research CAN tell us what to look out for in our classrooms. We have to use our experience to translate that guidance for our day-to-day work.


In the next post: INDENTIFYING WM overload.

Obsessed with Working Memory, Part II
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

In the first post of the series, we looked at the definition of working memory. Simply put, it allows brains to SHREK.

That is:

Select, Hold, REorganize, Kombine

This post considers three core ideas that we need to remember about WM.

1: Working Memory is CRUCIAL to Learning

“No academic information gets into long-term memory except through working memory.”

Simply put, students have to use WM to learn almost anything.

When students try to balance chemistry equations, they use WM.

When they sound out new words: WM.

When they compare Inca and Maya religions: WM.

When they transpose a song into a new key: yup, WM.

It is, in fact, hard to think of much that students do with low WM demands. For instance, when they sing “Happy Birthday,” that’s not much of a working memory task. After all, “Happy Birthday” is in almost everyone’s long-term memory.

Of course, if you’ve forgotten the name of the person whose birthday it is, you might feel your WM scramble when you sing: “Happy Birthday dear Hmm-Hmm, Happy Birthday to you.”

2: Working Memory is LIMITED

In the first post in this series, I asked you to alphabetize five days of the week. You could probably do that quite easily.

If, however, I asked you to alphabetize 10 months of the year, you would — almost certainly — crash before you got there. (Go ahead, try it. See what I mean?)

We have enough WM for five, but not enough for ten.

People experience WM overload frequently. For instance:

driving to an unfamiliar location requires lots of WM.

Exploring a new program on your computer.

Following a multi-step recipe.

Solving the problem in this video.

Let’s pause for a moment and put #1 and #2 together. Working memory is both CRUCIAL and LIMITED. That’s a very bad combination. (If you have a wry sense of humor, you might say it sounds like your school’s budget.)

So, let’s ask a vital question: how can we increase this vital cognitive resource?

3a: Good News about INCREASING Working Memory

We don’t have to do anything special. Working memory gets bigger as students get older.

In this way, WM is a  bit like height. As long as we’re treating students (and their bodies) well, they get taller. As long as we’re treating students (and their brains) well, working memory gets bigger.

The details here get technical — after all, we have several different ways we can measure WM. But, you can be confident that your 4th graders have more WM than they did when they were in 2nd grade. And, the 6th graders have more WM still.

This growth levels off in our early 20s. Alas, WM probably begins to decline (very slowly) soon after. But, don’t worry. All the extra information you have in your long-term memory makes up for the very modest decrements in your WM.

3B: Bad News about INCREASING Working Memory

We can’t.

Better said: we can’t artificially increase WM, beyond the natural increase that comes with growth and schooling.

Better said: we can’t YET do that.

LOTS of thoughtful people are working very hard on this problem, and have had some intriguing wins.

But, as of this post, we don’t have broad data suggesting that we can train up students’ WM with specially designed computer games, or exercises, or special diet, or whatever.

To be clear: this is a controversial field, and very accomplished people have devoted years of work to it. I hope — at some point — that this breakthrough does happen.

1+2+3a+3b = ?

We know

#1: that working memory is CRUCIAL in classrooms.

#2: that it’s LIMITED.

#3a & #3b: that we CAN’T artificially make it bigger.

Put those three conclusions together, and you arrive at this conclusion:

Teachers have to work effectively WITHIN THE WM CAPACITY THAT OUR STUDENTS HAVE.

In fact, we should be EXPERTS at working effectively within their WM capacity.

Every time we go beyond their limited capacity, they experience WM overload.

And, when students experience WM overload, they stop learning. This is why I’m OBSESSED with WM.

How do we do that? How can we work effectively WITHIN their working memory capacity?

The next several posts will cover this essential topic.

Obsessed With Working Memory: Part I
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

When I attended my first Learning and the Brain conference, I had never even heard of working memory.

Now, I obsess over working memory. And, I think all classroom teachers should join me.

Heck, I think everyone who cares about learning, curriculum, teacher training, and education should think about working memory. All. The. Time.

In this series of posts, I’ll start by defining working memory (WM) today. And in succeeding posts, I’ll talk about using that knowledge most helpfully.

Trust me: the more we think about WM, the more our students learn.

Working Memory: An Example

As an example of WM in action, I’m going to give you a list of 5 words. Please put those words in alphabetical order. IN YOUR HEAD. (That’s right: don’t write anything down…)

Okay, here’s the list:

Think of the five workdays of the week. (Hint: if you live in a Western society, the first one is ‘Monday.’)

Now, go ahead and put those five words into alphabetical order. Don’t peek. I’ll wait…

 

Probably you came up with this list:

Friday, Monday, Thursday, Tuesday, Wednesday

I do this exercise with teachers often. For most everyone, that’s fairly simple to do. I’m guessing you got it right quite easily.

Working Memory: A Definition

To succeed at that task, you undertook four mental processes.

First, you selected relevant information. Specifically, you selected the instructions that you read. And, you looked into your long-term memory to select the workdays of the week.

Next, you held that information. If you had let go of the instructions, or of the days of the week, you couldn’t have completed the task.

Third, you reorganized the days of the week according to the instructions. You started with a chronological list (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…), and converted it into an alphabetical lest (Friday, Monday, Thursday…).

In many WM tasks (but not this one), you might not only reorganize, but also combine information. If, for instance, you added up 7+12+4+18+6 in your head, you selected, held, and combined those numbers into a new number.

So:

Working memory is a limited, short-term memory capacity that selects, holds, reorganizes, and combines information from multiple sources.

In a later post, I’ll talk about some finer points in the definition of WM. For the time being, focus on those four verbs: select, hold, reorganize, combine.

Working Memory: An Acronym

Because WM is so important, it would be great if there were a handy acronym. Happily, there is!

Select

Hold

REorganize

Kombine

What does that get you? SHREK! (I know: I misspelled ‘combine.’ But: I lived in Prague for a year, so you can forgive me for that useful alteration.)

Working Memory in the Classroom

Now, ask yourself: which of these classroom tasks requires working memory?

That is: in which of these cases do your students have to select, hold, reorganize, and/or combine information?

Solving a word problem.

Comparing W.E.B. du Bois and Booker T. Washington.

Transposing a song into a new key.

Applying a new phonics rule to various combinations of letters.

Choreographing a dance routine.

The correct answer is: ALL OF THEM.

In fact, practically everything we do in school classrooms requires working memory. Often, it requires A LOT of working memory.

To Sum Up

We use WM to select, hold, reorganize, and combine (SHREK) information.

Students use WM constantly in classrooms, for practically everything they do.

Simply put: no academic information gets into long-term memory except through working memory. It’s that important.

Up next: we’ll highlight key facts about WM. Then we’ll talk about using that knowledge in your teaching.

If you’d like some homework, here it is:

Ask yourself: what work that students do in your own classroom requires working memory? Try to be specific: what are they selecting? What are they holding? And so forth…

Also ask yourself: what work does not require WM?

Decorating the Classroom: How Much Is Too Much?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Classrooms should do more than simply house our students. We want them to welcome students. To set an encouraging and academic tone. To reflect the values our schools champion.

That’s a lot of work for one classroom to do.

As a result, our rooms sometimes end up looking like the nearby image: a busy tumult of color and stuff.

Does this level of decoration have the desired result? Does it make students feel welcome, valued, and academic? Realistically, might it also distract them?

Two researchers in Portugal wanted to find out.

Today’s Research

Several people have studied the effect of classroom decoration on learning. (In perhaps the best-know study, Fisher, Godwin and Seltman showed that kindergarteners learned less in a highly decorated classroom.)

Rodrigues and Pandeirada wanted to know exactly which mental functions were disrupted by all that decoration. Their study design couldn’t be simpler.

These researchers created two study environments.

The first looks basically like a library carrel with a dull white finish.

The second added lots of lively, upbeat photos to that carrel.

The result isn’t as garish as the photo above, but it’s certainly quite busy. (You can see photographs of these two environments on page 9 if you click the link above.)

Rodrigues and Pandeirada then had 8-12 year-olds try tests of visual attention and memory.

For instance: students had to tap blocks in a certain order. (Like the game Simon from when I was a kid.) Or, they had to recreate a complex drawing.

Crucially, these 8-12 year-olds did these tasks in both environments. Researchers wanted to know: did the visual environment make a difference in their performance?

It certainly did.  On all four tests — both visual attention and memory — students did worse.

In short: when the visual environment is too busy, thinking gets harder. (By the way, visual distraction is not a “desirable difficulty.” It results in less learning.)

Two Sensible Questions

When I discuss this kind of research with teachers, they often have two very reasonable questions.

Question #1: how much is “too much”? More specifically, is my classroom “too much”?

Here’s my suggestion. Invite a non-teacher friend into your classroom. Don’t explain why. Notice their reaction.

If you get comments on the decoration — even polite comments — then it’s probably over-decorated.

“What a wonderfully colorful room!” sounds like a compliment. But, if your students see a “wonderfully colorful room” every day, they might be more distracted than energized.

Question #2: Won’t students get used to the busy decoration? My classroom might look over-decorated now, but once you’ve been here for a while, it will feel like home.

This question has not, as far as I know, been studied directly. But, the short answer is “probably not.”

The Fisher et al. study cited above lasted two weeks. Even with that much time to “get used to the decoration,” students still did worse in the highly-decorated classroom.

More broadly,  Barrett et al. looked at data for 150+ classrooms in 27 schools. They arrived at several conclusions. The pertinent headline here is: moderate levels of decoration (“complexity”) resulted in the most learning.

In other words: students might get used to visual complexity. But: the research in the field isn’t (as far as I know) giving us reason to think so.

Summer Thoughts

Here’s the key take-away from Rodrigues and Pandeirada’s research: we should take some time this summer to think realistically about our classroom’s decoration.

We want our spaces to be welcoming and informative. And, we want them to promote — not distract from — learning.

Research can point us in the right direction. We teachers will figure out how best to apply that research to our classrooms, for our students.


A final note: I’ve chatted by email with the study’s authors. They are, appropriately, hesitant to extrapolate too much from their library-carrel to real classrooms.

They show, persuasively, that visual distractions can interfere with attention and memory. But: they didn’t measure what happens in a classroom with other students, and teachers, and so forth.

I think the conclusions above are reasonable applications of these research findings; but, they are my own, and not part of the study itself.

Visual & Verbal: Welcome to “Dual Coding”
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Over at LoveToTeach87, Kate Jones has written a thoughtful and thorough exploration of Dual Coding.

What is “dual coding”? In brief, when we take care to present information in two formats — visual and verbal — we are dual coding.

Schools too often focus on verbal presentation of information. Dual coding theory reminds us to add visuals as well.

Jones’s post begins with a helpful over view of recent work in the field: in particular, the Learning Scientists, and also Oliver Caviglioli.

She then changes gears, and offers a variety of specific classroom for putting this concept into practice:

timelines

comics/storyboards

revised notes

summary cards

And so forth. Because her post includes so many splendid examples, I encourage you to check it out.

Behind the What, the Why

But, why exactly does dual coding help?

The short answer is: lots of reasons. But for me, the core answer comes back — as it so often does — to working memory.

Working memory allows brains to hold, reorganize, and combine information. In other words: all academic learning requires working memory.

And: we just don’t have very much. (Alas, there’s no artificial way to increase it. Yet.)

But, we do have a secret supply of extra working memory. More precisely, we have different WM stores for visual and auditory information.

If I present information only verbally, then students must hold all that information with that part of their WM.

It’s like doing mental push-ups with one arm.

But, if I provide information both verbally and visually, they get to use both parts of their WM.

And, of course, two arm push-ups are much easier to do.

In sum: dual coding helps students learn, because it divides WM load between verbal and visual capacities.

A Brief Warning

This teaching advice sounds a bit like learning styles. It suggests that we’ve got distinct visual and verbal learning capacities.

PLEASE do not confuse these two theories. Learning styles theory has no support — it just ain’t true.

We ALL use visual WM. We ALL use auditory WM. (Those of us who have sight and hearing.)

There is no “style” here. This cognitive architecture supports learning for us all.

And so, dual coding benefits practically everyone.

STOP THE PRESSES (And Yet, Remain Calm)
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

In the world of science, if you see the right kind of evidence, you have to change your mind.

As of this blog post, I might start changing my mind.

Regular readers know that I frequently decry false claims about “brain training.” In particular, when people claim to increase working memory capacity, we find that those claims don’t stand up to research scrutiny. (For instance: here and here and here.)

In my last post on the topic, I more-or-less gave up on the possibility. In fact, I wrote:

So, from now on, I’m just going to assume that new claims are highly likely to be false.

If brain training claims are subsequently replicated by many research teams; if the methodologies are scrutinized and approved by several scholars in the field; well, if that happens, I’ll relent.

For now, I don’t want to be fooled again.

But maybe — just maybe — researchers might have found a strategy to improve working memory. (I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence.)

April’s Big News

In a study just published in Nature Neuroscience, Reinhart and Nguyen might have found a way to boost working memory capacity.

We’ve got persuasive research showing that working memory overload causes brain waves in different regions to fall out of synch.

Reinhart and Nguyen, in effect, wondered if they could help resynchronize those brain waves.

In a multi-step study, they found that:

First: asynchrony of frontotemporal theta-phase waves corresponds with working-memory declines in 60-76 year olds (compared to 20-29 year olds).

(The findings get even more technical from there, so I’ll just stick with “brain waves” for now. If you want the details, click the link above.)

Second: the right kind of external electrical stimulation resynchronizes those waves.

Third: when the theta waves resynchronized, the WM function of the older subjects returned to levels typical for the younger subjects.

Technically speaking, THAT’S HUGE. The right kind of electrical stimulation improved WM.

What Happens Next?

A) Before we get too excited, we should let some expert skeptics weigh in. Although the concept is easy enough to understand — “the right kind of brain zaps restore WM to higher capacity!” — the specifics are fantastically complicated.

We should, in other words, let other scientists in this field kick the tires good and hard.

By the way: nine researchers have responded here. Several have suggestions for other populations to study: for instance, people diagnosed with dementia. But, none of them spot glaring errors in the methodology.

(For instance: in two studies I can think of, researchers made claims about improving working memory, but tested short term memory instead. This study doesn’t include that kind of switcheroo.)

B) Again before we get too excited, we should recall: this study isn’t about raising WM capacity for students. It is about restoring WM capacity for people who have experienced a decline.

That result might benefit each of us as we age. But, it doesn’t (yet) offer benefits to our students who have typically functioning WM.

However, this technique might help younger people with diagnosed WM deficits. That finding alone could be transformative for some students in our schools.

C) We don’t really know what this might look like outside of the neuroscience lab. As professor Robert Howard warns:

The “real world” benefits of any apparent improvements in experimental working memory function associated with the technique will also need to be evaluated together with the impact of any potential adverse effects of brain stimulation.

For example, induced improvements in working memory might come at the price of worsening of other areas of cognitive function.”

D) Okay, you can now go ahead and get really excited. I have said for years that if we could improve WM capacity, that change would be like the printing press in its effect on human cognition.

For the first time in a decade, I’m starting to think that it just might happen.

If you’d like to learn more, this very helpful summary of Reinhart and Nguyen’s work is a good place to start.

Working Memory Overload Throws Neurons Out of Synch
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

My English classroom often includes discussions like these:

When we read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, I might ask my students “who is the antagonist?”

To answer this question, my students must recall several bits of factual information:

the definitions of “antagonist” and “protagonist”

the major characters of the novel

their most important actions and goals

Once they’ve recalled those facts, my students have to rearrange all that information into new conceptual patterns.

Which character’s actions and goals best align with the definition of “protagonist”? (In this case, that’s an easy question. Janie Crawford is far and away the likeliest nominee. )

Who’s the antagonist? That is, which character’s actions and goals thwart Janie’s?

That’s a much harder question, and students must wrestle with several possibilities as they develop a plausible argument.

Let’s Talk About the Mind

Where do my students hold and process all this information?

For a psychologist, that’s an easy question: working memory.

Working memory allows students to select, hold, reorganize, and combine information held in long-term memory: in this case, the novel’s events.

It also allows them to select, hold, reorganize, and combine information perceived from the environment: the question I just asked about antagonists.

Because we constantly ask our students to hold and combine bits of information, our students use working memory all the time.

When we ask students to calculate the volume of a solid, or to compare historical figures, or to explain a trophic cascade, or to predict what will happen when I roll a ball down a ramp, we’re asking them to use working memory.

By the way: this truth hold for skills and processes as well. Why is learning to drive a stick shift so hard? Because you must hold, combine, and co-ordinate several distinct physical processes.

And, here’s an essential point: we don’t have lots of working memory to use.

Let’s Talk About the Brain

We know a lot about the mental processes involved in working memory. (I might have written a book about them.)

But, the neuroscience of working memory has been harder to study.

In the world of psychology, we know that WM can be easily overwhelmed.

But, in the world of neuroscience, we don’t know exactly what happens at that moment.

In other words: what’s happening in the physical object of the brain that accounts for the mental difficulty?

What happens, for example, when I can’t shift gears properly on this stupid manual car?

Are neurons somehow disconnecting from one another? Are electrical signals going haywire? Perhaps neurotransmitters are watching kitten videos on Youtube ?

Today’s News

We’re starting to get an answer to that question.

New research suggests that successful working memory functioning requires that distinct brain regions operate synchronously.

When they reach overload, those regions fall out of synch.

Once those regions no longer synchronize, then students might struggle to solve math problems, or sound out a word with new phonics rules, or conjugate a verb in a freshly learned tense.

Like much neuroscience research, this study is fantastically complicated. Luckily, it’s been described quite well by Jordana Cepelewicz over at Quanta Magazine. (No need to worry about the “seven plus or minus two” formula.)

The good news here is clear: we’re starting to get a clearer picture about the neuroscience of working memory overload. Because teachers should be obsessed with working memory overload, we might well be intrigued by this news.

We should keep in mind, by the way, that this research so far has been done with monkeys. Whenever considering new research, always keep this rule in mind:

Never, never, never change your teaching practice based on research into non-human animals.

At some point, we might get neuroscience research that helps teachers manage working memory load. Although that day isn’t today, we should be glad that research possibility is clearer now than before.

A Handy Summary of Memory Definitions, for Teachers and Students
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

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.

Taking Notes with Graphic Organizers
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

research-based advice for studentsWe’ve blogged (quite energetically) about the difference between handwritten and laptop notes.

Of course, other note-taking differences merit investigation as well.

For example: if students take handwritten notes, is it better to give them:

a complete lecture outline,

a partial lecture outline,

a bare-bones lecture outline,

or

a complete graphic organizer,

a partial one, or

an empty one?

Over at the Learning Scientists, Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel explores this question, and adds some thoughts of her own.

One Man’s Experience

This article particular caught my eye because it applies so directly to my own work.

When I talk with teachers, students, or parents about brains, I always provide them with option #5 above: an incomplete graphic organizer.

My goal: reduce working memory load. (I’m always focused on reducing extraneous working memory load.)

The informal feedback I get is strongly positive. Many teachers, in fact, tell me that they’ve started using the same form with their own students.

When you read Dr. Kuepper-Tetzel’s post, you’ll see how well (if at all) my practice accords with the research we have.