…to manage working memory.
Hello and welcome to the 88th edition of our fortnightly newsletter, Things in Education.
Welcome back to our series on information processing. In this series, we’ve written about how information is passed from the environment into human minds and what that means for teaching and learning. We’ve also written about how sensory memory processes cues from the environment and how that new information is passed on to working memory. In the last edition, we wrote about the limitations of working memory – it is limited and can hold only small amounts of new information at a time, and that too for a very short period of time. Overloading working memory reduces the efficiency of learning in students.
Today we continue to write about ways of optimising working memory. We have already introduced how working memory works. So let’s start with a question:
Mr. Singh teaches biology, and he teaches the life cycle of a butterfly by first showing the diagrams of the different stages of the butterfly life cycle – egg, larva, pupa, adult. Once the diagram is understood and practised by the students, Mr. Singh shares the description of each stage of the life cycle of a butterfly.
Ms. Mehta, who also teaches the life cycle of a butterfly, uses a slightly different approach. She goes stage by stage, and for each stage, Ms. Mehta ensures that students are exposed to the diagram and the description together.
Which approach do you think will reduce cognitive load on working memory of students?
One may be inclined to think that separating the diagram and the description would help students’ working memory load. However, it is quite the opposite. The students have to engage their working memory to understand and learn the diagram first. Then they need to engage their working memory, again, to learn the description of each stage. Instead, if the description and diagram is done at the same time, the students need to keep a particular stage in their working memory for some time, and both the diagram and description can be learned. Now this may feel contradictory to what we had written last time – that we need to break down new information into bite-sized bits before presenting them to the students. At the same time, related information should be given together to the students. Students should not need to integrate two pieces of information given to them separately. If we as teachers can give the information in an integrated manner, it will reduce cognitive load on the students’ working memory.
For example: When students are learning MS Excel, they should not be given the spreadsheet separately and the instructions or formula separately as a different file. Moving between the two files and trying to make sense of what formula goes where will become a cognitively overwhelming task. Similarly, when learning translations from Sanskrit to English or any other language, the translation should be available on the same page as the paragraph to be translated. Students should not need to hold the information of a translated word from one file to the other file.
Combining or chunking like pieces of information together is useful, and it helps reduce cognitive load on students’ working memory. Along with this, using separate oral and visual methods of giving information can also help students. Our working memory has two separate channels to deal with visual information and auditory information. Given that there are different channels, giving information through two different channels increases the capacity of the working memory. Using a flowchart along with orally stating the steps of a procedure to solve a differential equation will make it easier for the students to remember the steps of the procedure.
The first strategy of chunking similar information together helps reduce load on working memory, while the second strategy of leveraging visual and auditory channels increases the capacity of working memory.
Over the last few weeks we have written about sensory memory and working memory. Going forward we will explore long-term memory – the core of learning, which is, creating long-term memories.
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Edition: 3.36
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