Complex Cognitive Concepts: Memory and Learning Theory: A Masters EDU Paper

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While there is not one specific theory that applies to every learner, it is valuable to have multiple teaching tools available to effectively reach a spectrum of learners. This is a great primer for all faculty developers to use when looking to provide an overview paper for new educators. Many of the early career educators in the Faculty Incubator found it difficult to link theory to practice. By providing real-life examples that link these theories to education practice, this paper is able to emphasize the importance of foundational literature.

As medical educators adopt and implement a competency-based framework in medicine, the authors of this article argue that it is incumbent upon learners to drive their own education and to thoughtfully engage with their teachers and their learning environments to achieve expertise. This article contains a number of examples to help junior faculty thoughtfully teach their burgeoning master learners. Through an understanding of CLT, junior educators can think through the elements of a task assigned to the learner: A motivated learner is one who feels a sense of connection.

Faculty developers can cultivate this at a programmatic level by creating a collegial environment where teachers treat learners as though they are on the same team. The authors argue for cohorting trainees on the same treatment team for extended periods, beyond the typical monthly training block, to promote cohesion. Faculty developers should be intimately aware of the state of situated cognition for their learners, exposing learners to teachers whom they admire and seek to emulate.

This may include teachers who exemplify the best of evidence-based medical knowledge, superior interpersonal skills, or exceptional teamwork or leadership skills. The authors argue that program chairs should hire faculty who build individual relationships with the learners, and who effectively make tacit thought processes explicit. The work environment should include the physical space and the culture to promote teaching and feedback for learners.

This paper provides an overview of a significant number of learning theories in adult education in various contexts. The article provides an overview of theories in adult education, recognizing that adult education theory or andragogy may be foundationally flawed. Moreover, cognitive learning theorists would debate the differences in learning patterns between a child and an adult.

The theory also does not consider the importance of context and social factors in acquiring knowledge, skills, and attitudes. The arrangement of these principles makes them readily accessible, connecting different concepts into a coherent framework. Faculty developers should help junior faculty distinguish between true learning theories and seemingly reasonable ad hoc frameworks. The paper ultimately presents a framework that unifies several relevant theories in adult education. The proposed framework may be useful for faculty developers because it attempts to explain the process of learning.

Using this framework, faculty developers may be able to design learning environments that promote a better transfer of knowledge, skills, and attitudes to learners in the health professions. Cognitive psychology can be described as the study of how humans think with an intimate linkage to the study of human memory. Although educational and cognitive psychology have historically been viewed as distinct fields, the authors focus on the significant overlap between these philosophies. This paper focuses on five key cognitive psychology concepts that influence our approach to teaching and learning: Specifically, human memory is influenced by the degree to which we can impose meaning on the stimulus, context specificity i.

These cognitive psychology concepts have implications for the design of curricula and the teaching of learners. Information in isolation is of limited value. A learner who has difficulty applying knowledge may not lack understanding, but rather may need to recode the information into a clinically useful form. Additionally, junior faculty should consider the influences on memory when teaching in the clinical environment. Teachers should emphasize clinical and bedside teaching, as well as in situ simulation. In providing variation of the learning and application environments, educators can reduce dependence on context.

At times some junior faculty members may be resistant to learning about these new concepts, so it is important for faculty developers to make clear the linkages between these key aspects of psychology and how they relate to a clinical teaching practice. In this landmark paper, Ericsson et al. The authors examine a variety of contexts in which expertise has been described, including chess, art, athletics, and typing.

The authors reference a number of studies that dispel the notion that hereditary factors confer an increased likelihood of expertise in any particular domain. They argue that the difference between an expert and a good musician is likely the result of more frequent practice and less non-music focused leisure over the many years of musical training.

For further reading on this theory, we highly recommend this article to both junior faculty members and faculty developers: The fundamental tenet of this paper is that expertise is acquired rather than inherited. It follows that any teacher can foster expertise in their learners via deliberate practice. It is important to note that not all practice is deliberate practice. Simulation facilitates the effective deployment of deliberate practice because it allows for frequent repetition not necessarily experienced in the unpredictable authentic clinical environment.

Faculty developers must consider the great deal of time and effort required by deliberate practice. The individualized learning exercises must be unique to the learner and closely supervised. For the educator teaching a large number of learners or simultaneously tending to multiple levels of learners, deliberate practice would be challenging because of the individualized attention required.

Finally, deliberate practice requires full attention and effort, which can only be sustained for a finite period of time for most learners and may require recovery time between sessions. This theory is informed by models of human memory that suggest that sensory, working, and long-term memory are interlinked. Working memory has a very finite capacity, which is the rate-limiting step for learning. This paper defines key terms such as intrinsic load, extraneous load, and germane load and applies them to the learner. For junior faculty members, this paper is a key primer to understanding the science and theory behind learning.

Understanding the different components of human memory and capacity is invaluable when teaching the learner, emphasizing high-yield learning and avoiding extraneous cognitive load. This paper serves as a good overview of a very rich area of cognitive science. The paper is admittedly quite dense, so it would be prudent to guide new educators through this paper with clinical- or classroom-specific examples to bring these concepts to life.

Similar to our previous ALiEM Academic Primer Series papers, the main limitation is that we did not use a systematic or comprehensive search strategy. However, we did attempt to triangulate recommendations for key literature from multiple sources e. Faculty Incubator discussions, Twitter, etc. Additionally, while we did attempt to provide a broad range of inputs, there is potential for bias, as most of the submissions were from a limited number of junior faculty and experts.

We did augment this by using multiple social media calls, which resulted in a large number of additional suggestions. Full text available through open access at http: By the West JEM article submission agreement, all authors are required to disclose all affiliations, funding sources and financial or management relationships that could be perceived as potential sources of bias. The authors disclosed none. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. West J Emerg Med.

Published online Jan Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Abstract Introduction Many teachers adopt instructional methods based on assumptions of best practices without attention to or knowledge of supporting education theory. Methods A list of key papers on theories relevant to medical education was generated using an expert panel, a virtual community of practice synthetic discussion, and a social media call for resources. Results These educators identified 34 unique papers. Conclusion This paper presents a reading list of key papers for junior faculty in medical education roles.

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Working Memory Underpins Cognitive Development, Learning, and Education

Overview of current learning theories for medical educators. Conceptual frameworks to illuminate and magnify. Developing the master learner: Acquisition and Maintenance of Medical Expertise. Issues in cognitive psychology: J Contin Educ Health Prof.

INTRODUCTION

Applying educational theory in practice. Theoretical perspectives in medical education: General overview of the theories used in assessment: Learning theory and its application to the use of social media in medical education. Not another boring lecture: International Journal of Learning and Development.

The practicality of theory. A new vocabulary and other innovations for improving descriptive in-training evaluations. Grounded theory in medical education research: Literature reviews in the health professions: Problem solving skills, solving problems and problem-based learning. Medical education research in the context of translational science.

Medical education research as translational science. Data dredging, salami-slicing, and other successful strategies to ensure rejection-twelve tips on how to not get your paper published. Making the most of mentors: Teaching learners to be self-directed. Journal of Adult Education Quarterly Spring.

The top-cited articles in medical education: General Theory Overview 1. Relevance to Junior Faculty Educators can improve their teaching efficiency by understanding and using existing education theories. Considerations for Faculty Developers This paper may be a useful first resource to provide to junior faculty. Relevance to Junior Faculty Scholarship is the currency by which educators advance their career and the field. Considerations for Faculty Developers Bordage asserts that scholarship in health professions education lacks the ubiquitous use of CFs.

Kay D, Kibble J. Relevance to Junior Faculty This paper provides a nice summary of major learning theories. Considerations for Faculty Developers This is a great primer for all faculty developers to use when looking to provide an overview paper for new educators. Relevance to Junior Faculty This article contains a number of examples to help junior faculty thoughtfully teach their burgeoning master learners. Considerations for Faculty Developers A motivated learner is one who feels a sense of connection.

Taylor DC, Hamdy H. Relevance to Junior Faculty The article provides an overview of theories in adult education, recognizing that adult education theory or andragogy may be foundationally flawed. Considerations for Faculty Developers Faculty developers should help junior faculty distinguish between true learning theories and seemingly reasonable ad hoc frameworks.

Regehr G, Norman GR. What we do know has practical implications. One should also avoid making people hold on to unintegrated information for a very long time. For example, I could write a taxing sentence like, It is said that, if your work is not overwhelming, your car is in good repair, and the leaves have changed color, it is a good time for a fall vacation. I could reduce the working memory load by not making you wait for the information that provides the unifying theme, keeping the working memory load low: It is said that a good time for a fall vacation is when your work is not overwhelming, your car is in good repair, and the leaves have changed color.

There is no question that working-memory capabilities increase across the life span of the individual. In early tests of maturation e. The length of list that can be successfully repeated on some predefined proportion of trials is the digit span. It increases steadily with childhood maturation, until late childhood.

As we saw in the introductory section, clear practical findings do not typically come with a clear understanding of the theoretical explanation. There have been many explanations over the years for the finding of increasing memory span with age e. These explanations may lead to differing opinions of the best course for learning and education, as well. Explanations of intellectual growth based on working memory capacity stem from what has been called the neoPiagetian school of thought. Jean Piaget outlined a series of developmental stages, but with no known underlying reason for the progression between stages.

Pascual-Leone and Smith attributed the developmental increases to increases in the number of items that could be held in mind at once. The theory becomes more explicit with the contributions of Halford, Phillips, and Wilson and Andrews and Halford They suggests that it is the number of associations between elements that is restricted and that this matters because it limits the complexity of thought.

Similarly, addition requires the association between three elements: A concept like bigger than is a logical relation requiring three slots, e. Ratios require the coordination of four elements e. One problem with it is that it is not always straightforward to determine the arity of a concept, or number of ideas that must be associated. For example, a young child might understand the concept big elephant and then might be able to infer that elephants are bigger than dogs, without being able to use the concept of bigger than in a consistent manner more generally. The concept from Miller that items can be combined using knowledge to form larger chunks also applies to associations, and it is not clear how to be sure that the level of complexity actually is what it is supposed to be.

Knowledge allows some problems to be solved with less working memory requirement. It is beyond question that knowledge increases with age. Perhaps this knowledge increase is the sole reason for developmental change in working memory, it has been argued. Chi showed that children with an expertise in the game of chess could remember chess configurations better than adults with no such expertise. The expert children presumably could form larger chunks of chess pieces, greatly reducing the memory load. Case, Kurland, and Goldberg gave adults materials that were unfamiliar and found that both the speed of item identification and the memory span for those materials closely resembled what was found for 6-year-olds on familiar materials.

The implication was that the familiarity with the materials determines the processing speed, which in turn determines the span. Others have suggested that, more generally, speed of processing increases with age in childhood and decrease again with old age e.

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This view that rehearsal is actually important has been opposed recently. Repetition of each item as it is presented? In the case of using attention to refresh information, an interesting case can be made. Children who are too young about 4 years of age and younger do not seem to use attention to refresh items. For them, the limit in performance depends on the duration of the retention interval.

For older children and adults, who are able to refresh, it is not the absolute duration but the cognitive load that determines performance Barrouillet et al. There are reasons to care about whether the growth of capacity is primary, or whether it is derived from some other type of development. For example, if the growth of capacity results only from the growth of knowledge, then it should be possible to teach any concept at any age, if the concept can be made familiar enough.

If capacity differences come from speed differences, it might be possible to allow more time by making sure that the parts to be incorporated into a new concept are presented sufficiently slowly. We have done a number of experiments suggesting that there is something to capacity that changes independent of these other factors. Regarding knowledge, relevant evidence was provided by Cowan, Nugent, Elliott, Ponomarev, and Saults in their test of memory for digits that were unattended while a silent picture-rhyming game was carried out.

The digits were attended only occasionally, when a recall cue was presented about 1 s after the last digit. The performance increase with age throughout the elementary school years was just as big for small digits 1, 2, 3 , which are likely to be familiar, as for large digits 7, 8, 9 , which are less familiar. Gilchrist, Cowan, and Naveh-Benjamin further examined memory for lists of unrelated, spoken sentences in order to distinguish between a measure of capacity and a measure of linguistic knowledge.

The measure of capacity was an access rate, the number of sentences that were at least partly recalled. The measure of linguistic knowledge was a completion rate, the proportion of a sentence that was recalled, provided that at least part of it was recalled. Nevertheless, the number of sentences accessed was considerably smaller in first-grade children than in sixth-grade children about 2.

I conclude, tentatively at least, that knowledge differences cannot account for the age difference in working memory capacity. We have used a different procedure to help rule out a number of factors that potentially could underlie the age difference in observed capacity. On each trial of this procedure, an array of simple items such as colored squares is presented briefly and followed by a retention interval of about 1 s, and then a single probe item is presented.

The latter is to be judged identical to the array item from the same location, or a new item. This task is convenient partly because there are mathematical ways to estimate the number of items in working memory Cowan, It is possible to calculate k , which for this procedure is equal to N h-f , where h refers the proportion of change trials in which the change was detected hits and f refers to the proportion of no-change trials in which a change was incorrectly reported false alarms.

One possibility is that younger children remember less of the requested information because they attend to more irrelevant information, cluttering working memory for adults, cf. When there were 2 triangles and 2 circles, memory for the more heavily-attended shape was better than memory for the less-attended shape, to the same extent in children in Grades 1—2 and Grades 6—7, and in college students.

Yet, the number of items in working memory was much lower in children in Grades 1—2 than in the two older groups. It did not seem that the inability to filter out irrelevant information accounted for the age difference in capacity. Another possibility is that in Cowan et al. The results remained the same as before. It appears that neither encoding speed nor articulation could account for the age differences. So we believe that age differences in capacity may be primary rather than derived from another process. Alternatively, it could occur because of age differences in some other type of speed, neural space, or efficiency.

This remains to be seen but at least we believe that there is a true maturational change in working memory capacity underlying age differences in the ability to comprehend materials of different complexity. This is in addition to profound effects of knowledge acquisition and the ability to use strategies. The use of strategies themselves may be secondary to the available working memory resources to carry out those strategies.

According to the neoPiagetian view of Pascual-Leone and Smith , for example, the tasks themselves share resources with the data being stored. The attentional resource allocated to the items in the array was apparently deducted from the resource available to allocate attention optimally. In practical terms, it is worth remembering that several aspects of working memory are likely to develop: Although it is not always easy to know which process is primary, these aspects of development all should contribute in some way to our policies regarding learning and education.

In early theories of information processing, up through the current period, working memory was viewed as a portal to long-term memory. In order for information to enter long-term memory in a form that allows later retrieval, it first must be present in working memory in a suitable form. Sometimes that form appears modality-specific. For example, Baddeley, Papagno, and Vallar wondered how it could be that a patient with a very small verbal short-term memory span, 2 or 3 digits at most, could function so well in most ways and exhibit normal learning capabilities.

The answer turned out to be that she displayed a very selective deficit: Aside from this specific domain, there are several ways in which working memory can influence learning. It is important to have sufficient working memory for concept formation. The control processes and mnemonic strategies used with working memory also are critical to learning. Learning might be thought of in an educational context as the formation of new concepts. These new concepts occur when existing concepts are joined or bound together.

Some of this binding is mundane. If an individual knows what the year means and also what the Declaration of Independence is at least in enough detail to remember the title of the declaration , then it is possible to learn the new concept that the Declaration of Independence was written in the year Other times, the binding of concepts may be more interesting and there may be a new conceptual leap involved. For example, a striped cat is a tiger. As another simple example, to understand what a parallelogram is, the child has to understand what the word parallel means, and further to grasp that two sets of parallel lines intersect with one another.

The ideas presumably must co-exist in working memory for the concept to be formed. For the various types of concept formation, then, the cauldron is assumed to be working memory. According to my own view, the binding of ideas occurs more specifically in the focus of attention. We have taken a first step toward verifying that hypothesis. Cowan, Donnell, and Saults in press presented lists of words with an incidental task: Later, participants completed a surprise test in which they were asked whether pairs of words came from the same list; the words were always one or two serial positions apart in their respective lists, but sometimes were from the same list and sometimes from different lists.

The notion was that the link between the words in the same list would be formed only if the words had been in the focus of attention at the same time, which was much more likely for short lists than for long lists. This is a small effect, but it is still important that there was unintentional learning of the association between items that were together in the focus of attention just once, when there was no intention of learning the association. The theory of Halford et al. More complex concepts require that one consider the relationship between more parts. It may be possible to memorize that concept with less working memory, but not truly to understand the concept and work with it.

Take, for example, use of the concept of transitivity in algebra. Yet, a person who understands the rules of algebra still would not be able to draw the correct inference if that person could not concurrently remember the two equations. Even if the equations are side by side on the page, that does not mean that they necessarily can be encoded into working memory at the same time, which is necessary in order to draw the inference.

Lining up the equations vertically for the learner and then inviting the learner to apply the rule by rote is a method that can be used to reduce the working memory load, perhaps allowing the problem to be solved. However, working out the problem that way will not necessarily produce the insight needed to set up a new problem and solve it, because setting up the problem correctly requires the use of working memory to understand what should be lined up with what.

So if the individual does not have sufficient working memory capacity, a rote method of solution may be helpful for the time being. More importantly, though, the problem could be set up in a more challenging manner so that the learner is in the position of having to use his or her working memory to store the information. By doing so, the hope is that successful solution of the problem then will result in more insight that allows the application of the principles to other problems. That, in fact, is an expression of the issues that may lead to the use of word problems in mathematics education.

Researchers appear to be in fairly good agreement that one of the most important aspects of learning is staying on task. If one does not stick to the relevant goals, one will learn something perhaps, but it will not be the desired learning. Individuals who test well on working memory tasks involving a combination of storage and processing have been shown to do a better job staying on task.

A good experimental example of how staying on task is tied to working memory is one carried out by Kane and Engle using a well-known task designed long ago by John Ridley Stroop. In the key condition within this task, one is to name the color of ink in which color words are written. Sometimes, the color of ink does not match the written color and there is a tendency to want to read the word instead of naming the color.

This effect can be made more treacherous by presenting stimuli in which the word and color match on most trials, so that the participant may well lapse into reading and lose track of the correct task goal naming the color of ink. What that happens, the result is an error or long delay on the occasional trials for which the word and ink do not match.

Under those circumstances, the individuals who are more affected by the Stroop conditions are those with relatively low performance on the operation span test of working memory carrying out arithmetic problems while remembering words interleaved with those problems. In more recent work, Kane et al.

Participants carried devices that allowed them to respond at unpredictable times during the day, reporting what they were doing, what they wanted to be doing, and so on.

What is Working Memory? An Introduction and Review

It was found that low-span individuals were more likely to report that their minds were wandering away from the tasks on which they were trying to focus attention. This, however, did not occur on all tasks. The span-related difference in attending was only for tasks in which they reported that they wanted to pay attention. When participants reported that they were bored and did not want to pay attention, mind-wandering was just as prevalent for high spans as for low spans.

Although this work was done on adults, it has implications for children as well. Gathercole, Lamont, and Alloway suggest that working memory failures appear to be a large part of learning disabilities. Children who were often accused of not trying to follow directions tested out as children with low working memory ability. They were often either not able to remember instructions or not able to muster the resources to stick to the task goal and pay attention continually, for the duration needed. Of course, central executive processes must do more than just maintain the task goal. The way in which information is converted from one form to another, the vigilance with which the individual searches for meaningful connections between elements and new solutions, and self-knowledge about what areas are strong or weak all probably play important roles in learning.

There also are special strategies that are needed for learning. For example, a sophisticated rehearsal strategy for free recall of a list involves a rehearsal method that is cumulative. If the first word on the list is a cow, the second is a fish, and the third a stone, one ideally should rehearse cumulatively: Cowan, Saults, Winterowd, and Sherk showed that young children did not carry out cumulative rehearsal the way older children do and could not easily be trained to do so, but that their memory improved when cumulative rehearsal was overtly supported by cumulative presentation of stimuli.

For long-term learning, maintenance rehearsal is not nearly as effective a strategy as elaborative rehearsal, in which a coherent story is made on the basis of the items; this takes time but results in richer associations between items, enhancing long-term memory provided that there is time for it to be accomplished e. In addition to verbal and elaborative rehearsal, Barrouillet and colleagues have discussed attentional refreshing as a working-memory maintenance process.

We do not yet know what refreshing looks like on a moment-to-moment basis or what implications this kind of maintenance strategy has for long-term learning. It is a rich area for future research. The most general mnemonic strategy is probably chunking Miller, , the formation of new associations or recognition of existing ones in order to reduce the number of independent items to keep track of in working memory. The power of chunking is seen in special cases in which individuals have learned to go way beyond the normal performance.

Ericsson, Chase, and Faloon studied an individual who learned, over the course of a year, to repeat lists of about 80 digits from memory. He learned to do so starting with a myriad of athletic records that he knew so that, for example, might be recoded as a single unit, 3. After applying this intensive chunking strategy in practice for a year, a list of 80 digits could be reduced to several sub-lists, each with associated sub-parts. The idea would be that the basic capacity has not changed but each working-memory slot is filled with quite a complex chunk.

In support of this explanation, individuals of this sort still remain at base level about 7 items for lists of items that were not practiced in this way, e. Although we cannot all reach such great heights of expert performance, we can do amazing things using expertise. For example, memorization of a song or poem is not like memorization of a random list of digits because there are logical connections between the words and between the lines.

A little working memory then can go a long way. The importance of a good working memory comes in when something new is learned, and logical connections are not yet formed so the working memory load is high. When there are not yet sufficient associations between the elements of a body of material, working memory is taxed until the material can be logically organized into a coherent structure. Working memory is thought to correlate most closely with fluid intelligence, the type of intelligence that involves figuring out solutions to new problems e.

However, crystallized intelligence, the type of intelligence that involves what you know, also is closely related to fluid intelligence. The path I suggest here is that a good working memory assists in problem-solving hence fluid intelligence ; fluid intelligence and working memory then assist in new learning hence crystallized intelligence.

We have sketched the potential relation between working memory and learning.

Working Memory Underpins Cognitive Development, Learning, and Education

How is that to be translated into lessons for education? There is a large and diverse literature on this topic. As a starting point to illustrate this diversity, I will describe the chapters chosen for the book, Working memory and education Pickering, After an introductory chapter on working memory A.

Baddeley , the book includes two chapters on the relation between working memory and reading one by P. There is a chapter on the relation between working memory and mathematics education R. Espy , learning disabilities H. Swanson , attention disorders K. Cornish and colleagues , and deafness M. Other chapters cover more general topics, including the role of working memory in the classroom S.

Gathercole and colleagues , the way to assess working memory in children S. Pickering , and sources of working memory deficit M. It is clear that many avenues of research relate working memory to education, and I cannot travel along all of them in this review. To organize a diverse field, what I can do is to distinguish between several different basic approaches have been tried. The points described in the article up to this point should be kept in mind when one is trying to discern and understand what a particular learner can and cannot do.

Second, one can try to use training exercises to improve working memory, which, investigators have hoped, would allow a person to be able to learn more and solve problems more successfully. The message I would give here is to be wary, given the rudimentary state of the evidence in a difficult field and the plethora of companies selling working memory training exercises. Third, one might contemplate the role of working memory for the most critical goals of education, in a broad sense. These topics will be examined one at a time. The classic adaptation of education to cognitive development and the needs of learning has been to try to adjust the materials to fit the learner.

For example, there has been considerable discussion of the need to delay teaching concepts of arithmetic at least until the children understand the basic underlying concept of one-to-one correspondence; that is, the idea that there are different numbers in a series and that each number is assigned to just one object, in order to count the objects e.

There also are individual differences within an age group in ability that affect how the materials are processed. The enjoyment of technological presentations may be greater in students with better abilities in the most relevant types of working memory e. The theory distinguishes between an intrinsic cognitive load that comes from material to be learned and an extraneous cognitive load that should be kept small enough that the cognitive resources of the learner are not overly depleted by it.

This theory has the advantage of being rather nuanced in that many ramifications of cognitive load are considered. With too high a cognitive load, one runs the risk of the student not being able to follow the presentation, whereas with too low a cognitive load, one runs the risk of insufficient engagement.

In future, it might be possible to refine the predictions for classroom learning by combining cognitive load theory with theories of cognitive development, which make some specific predictions about how much capacity is present at a particular age in childhood e. Issues arise as to how printed items are encoded visually, verbally, or both and how much the combination of verbal and visual codes in multimedia should be expected to tax a common, central cognitive resource and therefore interfere with one another, even when they are intended to be synergic.

Both in cognitive psychology and in education, these are key issues currently under ongoing investigation. This might be done partly on the basis of success; if the student succeeds, the materials can be made more challenging whereas, if the student fails, the materials can be made easier. One potential pitfall to watch for is that, while some students will want to press slightly beyond their zone of comfort and will learn well, others will want an easy time, and may choose to learn less than they would be capable of learning.

One way to cope with these issues is through computerized instruction, but with a heavy dose of personal monitoring and adjustment to make sure that the task is sufficiently motivating for every student. There are several obstacles in this regard. Slevc showed that speakers tend to blurt out what is most readily available in working memory. He used situations that were to be described verbally by the participant, e. If one piece of information had already been presented, it was more likely to be described first. For example, if the monk had been presented already but not the book, the participant was more likely to phrase the description differently, as A pirate gave the monk a book.

This assignment of priority to given information is generally appropriate, given that the speaker and listener or writer and reader share the same given information. In this case, though, Slevc shows that the tendency to describe given information first was diminished when the speaking participant was under a working memory load. In a didactic situation such as giving a lecture, it thus seems plausible that the memory load inherent in the situation remembering and planning what one wants to say in the coming segments of a lecture may cause the lecturer sometimes to use awkward grammatical structure.

Moreover, as mentioned above, learning to speak or write well requires that one bear in mind possible difference between what one knows as the speaker or writer and what the listener or reader knows at key moments. Bearing in mind what the listener or reader knows and does not yet know is likely to be important both for educators in their own speaking and writing, and also in order to teach students how to speak and write effectively.

A much more controversial approach is to use training regimens to improve working memory, thereby improving performance on the educational learning tasks that require working memory e. It is controversial partly because many people have spent a great deal of money purchasing such training programs before the scientific community has reached an agreement about the efficacy of such programs. Doing working memory training studies is not easy. One needs a control group that is just as motivated by the task as the training group but without the working memory training aspect. The training task must be adaptive with rewards for performance that continues to improve with training and a non-adaptive control group does not adequately control arousal and motivation.

Some task that is adaptive but involves long-term learning instead of working memory training may be adequate. Several large-scale reviews and studies have suggested that working memory training sometimes improves performance on the working memory task that is trained, but does not generalize to reasoning tasks that must rely on working memory in adults, Redick et al. In somewhat of a contrast, other reviews suggest that the training of executive functions inhibiting irrelevant information, updating working memory, controlling attention, etc.

So there is an ongoing controversy, even among those who have written meta-analyses and reviews of research. One might ask how it is possible to improve working memory without having the effect of improving performance on other tasks that rely on working memory. This can happen because there are potentially two ways in which training can improve task performance.

First, working memory training theoretically might increase the function of a basic process, much as a muscle can be strengthened through practice. Or at least, individuals might learn that through diligent exertion of their attention and effort, they can do better. That is presumably the route hoped for in training of working memory or executive function.

Second, though, it is possible for working memory training to result in the discovery of a strategy for completing the task that is better than the strategy used initially. This can improve performance on the task being trained, but the experience and the strategy learned may well be irrelevant to performance on other educational tasks, even those that rely on working memory. This route might be expected if, as I suspect, participants typically look for a way to solve a problem that is not very attention-demanding, unless the payoff is high.

If there is successful working memory training, another issue is whether training is capable of producing super-normal performance or whether it is mostly capable of rectifying deficiencies. By way of analogy, consider physical exercise. If a person is already walking 6 miles a day, there might be little benefit to the heart of adding aerobic exercise.

Similarly, if a person is already highly engaged in the environment and using attention control often and effectively during the day, there might be little benefit to the brain of adding working memory exercises. It remains quite conceivable, though, that such exercises are beneficial to certain individuals who are under-utilizing working memory.

Nevertheless, as Diamond and Lee points out, there might be social or emotional reasons why this is the case and such factors would need to be addressed along with, or in some cases instead of, working memory training per se. What is the difference between learning and education? This is a question that has long been asked for a history of the early period of educational psychology in the United States, for example, see Hall, Do children learn better when they are fed the information intensively, or allowed to explore the material?

Should all children be expected to learn the same material, or should children be separated into different tracks and taught the information that is thought to help them the most in their own most likely future walks of life? A fundamental difference between learning and education, many would agree, is that education should facilitate the acquisition of skills that will promote continued learning after the student leaves school.

Of course, after the student leaves school, a major difference is that there is no teacher to decide what is to be learned, or how. Therefore, what seems to be most important, many would agree, is critical thinking skills. For example, Halpern p. For example, Shim and Walczak found that professors asking challenging questions resulted in more improvement in both subjective and objective measures of critical thinking.

The objective measure required that students clarify, analyze, evaluate, and extend arguments, and increased 0. The gain was much stronger in students with high pretest scores in critical thinking. There is the possibility that training working memory will in some way improve reasoning and vice versa, though most would agree at this point that the case has not yet been completely made e. A current interest of mine is to understand how fallacies in reasoning might be related to fallacies in working memory performance.

There appear to be some similarities between the two. One of the best-known reasoning fallacies is confirmation bias. Participants get that they must turn over the cards that can either confirm or disconfirm the rule in the example, the cards showing vowels. They often fail to realize that they must also turn over cards that can only disconfirm the rule. In the example, one must turn over cards with odd numbers because the rule is disconfirmed if any of those cards have a vowel on the other side. In contrast, cards that can only confirm the rule are irrelevant. One should not turn over cards with even numbers because the rule is technically not disconfirmed no matter whether there is a consonant or vowel on the other side.

Chen and Cowan in press found performance on a working memory task that closely resembles confirmation bias. In one procedure, a spatial array of letters was presented on each trial, followed by a set of all of the letters at the bottom of the screen and a single location marked; the task was to select the correct letter for the marked location. In another procedure, the spatial array of letters was followed by a single letter from the array at the bottom of the screen and all of the locations marked; the task was to select the correct location for the presented letter.

When working memory does not happen to contain the probed item, these procedures allow the use of disconfirming information. In the first task, for example, a participant might reason as follows: The letters were K, R, Q, and L. I know the locations of only R and L and neither of them match the probed location. Therefore, I know that the answer must be K or Q and I will guess randomly between them.

That would be comparable to using disconfirming evidence. The pattern of data, however, did not appear to indicate that kind of process. Instead, participants answered correctly if they knew the probed item and otherwise guessed randomly among all of the other choices, without using the process of elimination. A mathematical model that assumed the latter process showed near-perfect convergence in capacity between the procedures described above and the usual change-detection procedure.

If we instead assumed a mathematical model of performance in which disconfirming evidence was used through the process of elimination, there was no such convergence between the procedures. So in reasoning and in working memory, processing tends to be inefficient, and it remains to be seen whether it can be meaningfully improved in terms of eliminating confirmation bias.

Perhaps people with insufficient working memory or intelligence will always be stuck in such inefficient reasoning and there is nothing we can do. One might be able to train individuals to make the best use of the working memory they have without worrying about increasing the basic capacity of working memory, either by training critical thinking skills Halpern, or by instilling expertise Eriksson et al. Working memory is the retention of a small amount of information in a readily accessible form, which facilitates planning, comprehension, reasoning, and problem-solving.

When we talk of working memory, we often include not only the memory itself, but also the executive control skills that are used to manage information in working memory and the cognitive processing of information. Theoretically, there is still uncertainty about the basic limitations on working memory: While these basic issues are debated and empirical investigations continue, there is much greater agreement about what results are obtained in particular test circumstances; the results of working memory studies seem rather replicable, but small differences in method produce large differences in results, so that one cannot assume that a particular working memory finding is highly generalizable.

For learning and education, it is important to take into account the basic principles of cognitive development and cognitive psychology, adjusting the materials to the working memory capabilities of the learner. We are not yet at a point at which every task can be analyzed in advance in order to predict which tasks are doable with a particular working memory capability. It is possible, though, to monitor performance and keep in mind that failure could be due to working memory limitations, adjusting the presentation accordingly. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U.

Author manuscript; available in PMC Jun 1. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer. See other articles in PMC that cite the published article. Abstract Working memory is the retention of a small amount of information in a readily accessible form. What is Working Memory? Open in a separate window. Early History of Working Memory Research In , John Locke distinguished between contemplation, or holding an idea in mind, and memory, or the power to revive an idea after it has disappeared from the mind Logie, Ubiquity of the Working Memory Concept When we say that working memory holds a small amount of information , by this term we may be referring to something as abstract as ideas that can be contemplated, or something as concrete as objects that can be counted e.

The Past 64 Years There are several modern beginnings for the working memory concept. Contributions of George Miller Miller discussed the limitation in how many items can be held in immediate memory. Model of Cowan Through the years, there were several other proposals that alter the flavor of the working memory proposal. How consistent is Cowan with the Baddeley and Hitch model?

Contributions of Robert Logie With the addition of the episodic buffer, the model of Baddeley and Hitch makes predictions that are often similar to those of Cowan Other models of cross-domain generality One difference between the Baddeley framework and that of Cowan was that Cowan placed more emphasis on the possibility of interference between domains. Ongoing controversies about the nature of working-memory memory limits There are theoretically two basic ways in which working memory could be more limited than long-term memory.

Long-term working memory It is clear that people function quite well in complex environments in which detailed knowledge must be used in an expert manner, despite a severe limit in working memory to a few ideas or items at once. Specific mathematical models Here I have been selective in examining models of working memory that are rather overarching and verbally specified. Status of Working Memory The progress in this field might be likened to an upward spiral. Working Memory and Cognitive Development There is no question that working-memory capabilities increase across the life span of the individual.

Explanations Based on Capacity Explanations of intellectual growth based on working memory capacity stem from what has been called the neoPiagetian school of thought. Explanations Based on Knowledge It is beyond question that knowledge increases with age. Working Memory and Learning In early theories of information processing, up through the current period, working memory was viewed as a portal to long-term memory.

Working Memory and Concept Formation Learning might be thought of in an educational context as the formation of new concepts. Working Memory and Control Processes Researchers appear to be in fairly good agreement that one of the most important aspects of learning is staying on task. Working Memory and Mnemonic Strategies There also are special strategies that are needed for learning.

Working Memory and Education We have sketched the potential relation between working memory and learning. Teaching to the Level of Working Memory The classic adaptation of education to cognitive development and the needs of learning has been to try to adjust the materials to fit the learner. Working Memory Training A much more controversial approach is to use training regimens to improve working memory, thereby improving performance on the educational learning tasks that require working memory e.

Working Memory and the Ultimate Goals of Education What is the difference between learning and education? Conclusion Working memory is the retention of a small amount of information in a readily accessible form, which facilitates planning, comprehension, reasoning, and problem-solving. A cognitive complexity metric applied to cognitive development. A proposed system and its control processes. The psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory. Oxford Psychology Series Trends in Cognitive Sciences. The phonological loop as a language learning device.

Working memory span development: A time-based resource-sharing model account. The psychology of learning and motivation. When long-term learning depends on short-term storage. Journal of Memory and Language. On the law relating processing to storage in working memory. The growth of memory in school children. American Journal of Psychology. Visual mental image generation does not overlap with visual short-term memory: A dual-task interference study.

A temporal ratio model of memory. Memory for serial order: A network model of the phonological loop and its timing. Camos V, Barrouillet P. Developmental change in working memory strategies: From passive maintenance to active refreshing. Adaptive choice between articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing in verbal working memory. Operational efficiency and the growth of short-term memory span.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. Chein J, Morrison A. Expanding the mind's workspace: Core verbal working memory capacity: The limit in words retained without covert articulation. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. Minimal information is utilized in visual recognition tasks.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Knowledge structures and memory development. Is he coming or going? On the acquisition of deictic verbs. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior. Concurrent performance of two memory tasks: Evidence for domain-specific working memory systems. Acoustic confusion in immediate memory. British Journal of Psychology. Courage ML, Cowan N, editors. The development of memory in infancy and childhood. Evolving conceptions of memory storage, selective attention, and their mutual constraints within the human information processing system. Verbal memory span and the timing of spoken recall.

Learning Theories. Their Influence on Teaching Methods

Oxford University Press; Oxford Psychology Series, No. An embedded-processes model of working memory. Miyake A, Shah P, editors. Models of Working Memory: Mechanisms of active maintenance and executive control. Cambridge University Press; The magical number 4 in short-term memory:

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