Cognitive view: information-processing theory (part 1)  (Page 3/4)

Take a moment now to think how you might remember a telephone number if you had to look it up and then walk over to aphone a short distance away to dial that number. If it is a local number, it has seven digits. As long as your working memory hasseven slots available, you should be good to go. But what if someone delivers some surprising news to you halfway through yourwalk to the phone? It is unlikely that you will remember the phone number because you will be using some of your working-memorycapacity to process the news you have just received. The point is, working memory is just too small for us to do everything wewould like to be capable of doing.

This limited capacity has profound implications for teaching and learning. Let us now consider how the students in your classroom areaffected. If you provide them with complicated instructions for an assignment, there is likely minimal space remaining in working memoryfor them to comprehend the content. Likewise, if the pace of your instruction is too fast, with lots of information conveyed at a quickpace, there will be little chance for your students to sufficiently process the information, and maybe even not enough opportunity forthem to write it down for later study. A disciplined, controlled pace of presentation is essential if meaningful learning is to occur.

Maintenance and elaborative rehearsal

You might be wondering exactly what happens while information is being processed in working memory. What does it mean for information to be“processed”? We typically refer to processing in working memory with the term rehearsal. There are two principal types of rehearsal: maintenance and elaborative. Maintenance rehearsal is what you were likely doing as you walked from the telephone book to the nearest phone across the room—i.e., repeatingthe information over and over to yourself in order to keep it “active.” This is by far the easiest type of rehearsal but it isalso the least effective. How well will you remember that phone number two hours from now?

The second type of rehearsal is elaborative rehearsal. When one uses elaborative rehearsal, one connects the new information withpreviously learned information; this integration of old and new information has a dramatic impact on the memorability of the newinformation. Let's go back to that phone number. Imagine that you recognize the last four digits to be the same as the house numberwhere you lived for your entire childhood. Now is the phone number easier to remember? Of course it is. The integration of priorknowledge (the house number) with new information (the phone number) improves the memorability of the phone number.

Duration

How long does information hang around in working memory? If it is being rehearsed, information will be active until rehearsal of thatinformation ceases. But if no particular processing strategy (e.g., maintenance or elaborative rehearsal) is being applied to theinformation, it will vanish from working memory within 5-20 seconds. The reason for that broad estimate is that the information could die aslower death if no new information is imported into working memory to consume whatever limited space is available. Neglected informationwill not survive long in a busy working memory.