- Memory has been the subject of speculation and wonder
for at least two thousand years.
As early Greek philosophers pondered the workings
of our minds.
And it has only been during the last 100 years or so
that we began to scientifically explore
the biological basis of memory involving neurons
and synapses in the brain, and they form and change
as we age.
This science of the brain has taken great leaps
forward recently with the development
of new imaging technologies
like functional magnetic resonance imagine, or fMRI.
But our study of memory in this course
will not involve the neuro-physiological aspects
of learning because at this point that field
of study doesn't yet inform the day-to-day
practice of teachers.
Rather, we will be learning about the research
emerging from cognitive science which now powerfully
informs us about how we can teach and learn more effectively
So what is cognitive science?
It involves a variety of different research disciplines
including psychology, computer science, linguistics,
artificial intelligence, anthropology, neuroscience,
and philosophy, all striving to understand
through interdisciplinary study how human cognition
and intelligence develops and shapes our behavior.
By studying human behavior and performance,
we can learn much about how memory works
and how deep learning occurs.
We'll begin our study of learning and memory
through the lens of cognitive science
by looking at a simple schematic model,
acknowledging up front that we're simplifying
an enormously complex and dynamic set of processes.
The model we will present is a modified version
of that first published by Atkinson and Shiffrin in 1968.
Let's start by imagining a science teacher
introducing a lesson about food pyramids and energy flow
to her class.
As she talks and points to images on the Smart Board,
her students initially perceive this auditory and visual
information and store it temporarily in their
sensory registers.
Then if attended to by each student, this information
is moved into what's called short-term memory for processing
Short-term memory can be thought of as our immediate
consciousness of where we do our thinking and reasoning.
Short-term memory holds a limited amount of information
for only short periods of time.
Usually five to 30 seconds.
It is similar to what you might have heard before
as working memory and it can be overloaded.
This overload diminishes student learning,
something we'll discuss in later units.
Next, depending on how the information is processed
in short-term memory, it may or may not be moved
into long-term memory for storage and later use.
An important set of questions we will be addressing
throughout this course is one, how can we help our students
make memories that are enduring and durable?
And two, how can we help our students make memories
that can be transferred to new situations later?
Now let's look in more detail at how the different
components of this model of memory work together
and interact.
Incoming environmental stimuli are picked up by our
senses and enter what are called our sensory registers.
Of course, we do not perceive most of the stimuli
in our environment.
For example, compared to other mammals, our human
auditory sensory range is somewhat limited,
as is our sense of smell.
But our capability to pick up visual information
in our environment is pretty good.
Whatever information we do sense then goes
into our sensory registers and remains
for only a very short time.
Usually measured in fractions of a second.
Then some small proportion of what our
senses perceive is attended to.
And we become aware of it in some conscious way.
Although we certainly perceive our surroundings
in important ways even without becoming
consciously aware.
For example, the tactile pressure of the chair
you might be sitting on right now.
This information filters or bottlenecks,
is what we call selective attention.
In other words, to become aware of sense information
from our surroundings, we must pay attention
to it some way in order to move it into
our short-term memory for processing.
It is crucial to manage our attention in this way.
Otherwise, the world would be as the famous
psychologist William James expressed it,
"One great blooming, buzzing confusion."
This explains why two people can be in the same
sensory environment, yet experience that environment
in sometimes very different ways.
Now let's go back to our three students
sitting in the science class.
All three students will hopefully perceive
the teacher's voice and watch what she is doing.
At least, in the beginning.
So this information will enter into each of their
visual and auditory sensory registers.
What happens next is where things can go right
or wrong from the standpoint of teaching.
For example, one student may quickly become
engrossed in surreptitiously looking at her smart phone.
Another may initially attend to what the teacher is saying,
but then the picture of the lion prompts him
to remember seeing the movie The Lion King,
and he starts thinking about that.
The third student on the other hand,
does what we hope all of our students do most of the time.
Pays attention to the teacher, and actively
engages what is being taught, in this case by taking notes.
For the cell phone using student, there is probably
very little if anything of what the teacher
is doing that enters into the conscious awareness
of her short-term memory.
This student may vaguely sense the teacher talking
but she is not comprehending her in any meaningful way.
This is because the student's attention is focused
on the smart phone.
However, she is paying attention and processing something
in her short term memory, but it's the wrong thing.
The information on her smart phone.
The second student also ends up attending very little
to what the teacher is doing because his focus
is on the thinking about The Lion King.
He's paying virtually no attention to his surrounding
environment but he is attending and cognitively
processing in short-term memory the memories
he is retrieving from long-term memory about the movie.
Both students are paying attention and processing
incoming information, but with regard to the wrong things.
Despite their attentiveness, for our purposes as teachers,
they are distracted and off task.
As a quick aside, we'll talk in week three about
self-regulated learning and discuss different forms
of student inattention and distraction
and how to minimize them.
We'll even make the case that mind-wandering
can sometimes be a good thing for the learners
in our classroom.
For now let's go back to our model student
paying attention to the teacher.
She is no doubt processing in short-term memory
what the teacher is conveying by taking notes.
But here's an important insight from a learning standpoint.
At the end of her time paying attention to her teacher
and taking notes, the student may have either
learned very little or possibly a lot.
It will mostly depend on how deeply she was able
to cognitively process what her teacher was presenting
and doing.
In other words, was the student able to meaningfully
link the new information with what she already knew?
Her prior knowledge.
This will be determined by how much she actively
and consciously reaches into her long-term memory
from her short-term memory to retrieve and think about
what she is seeing and hearing from the teacher.
This dialogue between short-term memory
and long-term memory is what will make and store
memories for this new learning.
This is the essence of active learning.
On the other hand, if a student mostly listens
and or watches in a learning environment
without being given the chance to actively process
new information, it likely won't stick
in the form of new and usable memories.
That's even if the students are rapt with attention
because most of their thinking and processing
will still be in short-term memory which soon decays
and is lost.
Unfortunately this happens too often in schools
when students aren't encouraged or required to actively
process what they are meant to be learning.
There are many ways to do this and we will
focus on this in later sessions.
Long-term memory is undoubtedly the most complex
component of our memory system,
so as educators, it is critically important
to understand the basics of how it works.
Something we'll do in the following sessions.
That's because enduring and useful memories
are what we hope results with regards to the essential
concepts and skills we teach all of our students.
We want them to be able to transfer
what they learn in our schools.
The most important learning, anyway, to situations
in their own personal lives and ultimately
to their work and civic lives in the future.
If they can't transfer beyond our classrooms
some important aspects of what we teach them,
does it matter then what we teach them?
Let's review some of the important ideas from this unit.
All of which we hope to deepen your understanding
in the coming weeks.
First, creating long-lasting memories is most successful
when new information is meaningfully linked
to already-existing knowledge in our memories.
Second, the more we process and think about something
new to the learned, the more enduring and retrievable
the memories become.
This most often involves a dialogue between
short-term memory, and long-term memory.
In other words, we have to think to learn.
By actively and consciously processing
new information and experiences.
Our later session about making enduring memories
will explain more in-depth.
Third, if the first two don't happen,
our students can be super attentive and work very hard,
but learn very little in terms of making
durable memories and learning that they can later use.
Finally, short-term memory is limited
in time and capacity and can be overloaded
in a way that limits learning.
We will address this and ways to avoid it in later sessions.
So that's a simple model of how memory works,
and we hope our subsequent sessions will deepen
your understanding of its major features,
always with this question in mind:
How can this developing understanding of how learning
happens be used to enhance my own teaching practice?
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