Working memory has a functional limit. It may be as low as four items for adults, and it is an average of 7 for teenagers.
This piece of information has changed the way in which I present information. Now I make sure I do not give any lists longer than 7 items at any one given time.
Less is more!!!
Extensive research on retention indicates that 70 to 90 percent of new learning is forgotten within 18 to 24 hours after the lesson. Therefore, in order to test whether information actually has been transferred to long-term storage, do not test less than 24 hours after learning, and come as a surprise to the learner, with no warning or preparation time.
Explain to students that unannounced tests help them see what as well as how much they have retained and learned over a given period of time.
P.S. 1/22/2011
ReplyDeleteI was recently reading Nicholas Carr's The Juggler's Brain, and he writes that the functional limit of our working memories, described by George Miller in 1956, may have been an overstatement.
More than forty years later, John Sweller (1999)explains that "we can process no more than about two to four elements at any given time with the actual number probably being at the lower rather than the higher end of this scale."