A topic in Learners’ conceptions and thinking
Memory is a key concept related to learning – but some common-sense ideas about memory are found to be questionable at best.
Chunking
A key issue in learning is the capacity of human working memory, considered to be where people carry out their conscious thinking.
(Read about 'Working memory'.)
Although this is a very severe limitation as it restricts how much unfamiliar material a person can cope with (in a lesson or lecture or video or on a webpage, for example), it is not an absolute limit on the amount of information hat can processed, as material can sometimes be 'chunked':
"Although processing capacity in human cognition is limited to working with around 7 units of information or perhaps slightly less, these units are not themselves of a fixed size or complexity: so a single unit of information can in some circumstance be rather complex. For example, people are able to recall more words when asked to recall sentences than when asked to recall simple lists of words…
This phenomenon is called ‘chunking’ as in effect the cognitive system is able to ‘chunk’ together different elements into a whole, which can then be handled as a single unit.
Chunking is not a means of bypassing processing capacity limits in an ad hoc fashion… Rather, information which is closely associated, that is, which has become closely associated by previous cognitive activity, can be treated as a single quantum of information for the purposes of WM."
Taber, 2013, pp.111-112
This can be understood as related to the notion of 'meaningful' (rather than 'rote') learning – familiar material will be perceived as less complex than unfamiliar materials.
For example, if you are asked to remember some text in a familiar language it is obliviously much easier than being asked to remember a text which is similar in terms of its complexity as a text, but which only appear (to you) as as a sequence of symbols.
You do not read the text in the familiar language as a sequence of symbols, but rather you chunk the characters into words, that have a meaning for you, and because you can interpret the sequence of words as having an overall meaning you are not trying to process an arbitrary sequence of words, but a representation of a sentence representing a meaningful idea.
Moreover, if you are from a country where the proverb is a well-known saying you have an advantage over someone who has never come across this sentence before. They might later confabulate in recall – perhaps substituting a tortoise and a duck as the egg-layers, when someone who already knows the proverb would not make that mistake.
How do we chunk?
Chunking is basically an automatic process carried out per-consciously without deliberate effort. So we do not need to learn to chunk: it is just how our cognitive systems work.
However, if we understand about chunking then we can take it into account when planning our own learning or when teaching.
Work cited:
- Taber, K. S. (2013). Modelling Learners and Learning in Science Education: Developing representations of concepts, conceptual structure and conceptual change to inform teaching and research. Dordrecht: Springer.
