Reflections the Science of Memory - What is Thinking?

The Learning and the Brain conference is an overwhelming experience.  That’s not a complaint.  It’s the best professional development I’ve ever participated in.  It’s overwhelming in the way a magnificent artwork is overwhelming, just too much to take in.  It’s overwhelming in the way meeting a beloved public figure would be overwhelming, just wanting to remember every part of the moment but also knowing that you won’t.  I have attended this conference twice now, and I have come away both times with the same mixture of feelings.  First, I feel mostly affirmed that much of what I and my colleagues are doing is in line with how student's brains work.  Even though much of it has been developed through trial and error or intuition, we seem to have done a lot right.  Second, there are some changes we need to make to some of our practices.  Holding those two thoughts simultaneously weighs down my luggage on the trip home.

The only way I have found to deal with the sheer volume of information I get from this conference is to reflect on parts of it a little at a time while I figure out how I might like to apply them.  Since this blog is for me to reflect and process my thoughts and let you read them if you wish, I’ll be dealing with those here for a while. They might come out in weekly posts or I might post several over the course of a few days.  Who knows?  If you just want straightforward notes (with a few personal thoughts because that’s how I take notes), you can find them at these three posts (Friday, Saturday, Sunday).  These posts will be both more and less than the notes.  More because I will be working out my own thoughts but less because I will likely choose small parts to reflect upon.

I am going to say something that will make many teachers angry.  Learning styles are a myth.  They are a kind, well-intentioned, and humane myth.  I know you can tell me about a kid in your class who suddenly started doing better when you . . . In science, we call that anecdotal evidence, and I teach my 8th graders that it is poor science.  I can give you evidence of people who died after drinking water, but it doesn't mean water kills people.  Science is based on research, not an isolated story.  MRI scans show that there is nothing different in the brain of someone who is a "visual learner" and someone who is an "auditory learner."  It is a preference in the same way favorite colors are preferences.  The reason you can point to classroom practice and say it works is because the brains of all students respond to teaching in a richer learning environment that includes multiple modalities.  It's called dual coding, and there will be a separate post about it.

This post is to explain the cycle of thinking and learning.  Let's start with a few terms.

• Sensory memory - What happens as you take in data from any of your senses.  It lasts microseconds while you decide what to attend to.
• Working memory - What happens in your brain while you are learning something.  When you rehearse a phone number over and over so you can remember it when you get to the phone, you are holding things in working memory.  It can hold an average of 4 items at one time. 
• Cognitive load - When the working memory reaches the maximum it can hold.  
• Retrieval - This is the intentional process of remembering.  When you have to think about a question in order to answer it, you are engaging in retrieval.
• Long term memory - These are the things you can still remember a week, a year, a decade after learning them.  When someone says, "Who you gonna call," and you respond with, "Ghostbusters," it's because it is in your long-term memory.

This cycle happens every time you learn something.  

• First, you take in thousands of pieces of information through your senses.  
• You choose one to pay attention to.  You can only pay attention to one thing at a time.  Multi-tasking is just rapid switching between single tasks. Something is always lost in the switch. 
• What you pay attention to goes into your working memory, where you make meaning of the relationships between the items.  You rehearse the information by writing it down or repeating it to yourself.  As you do, it makes its way to your long term memory.  If you relate it to things you already know, your brain makes connections to those neurons, creating richer meaning and increasing the likelihood that it will stay in your long term memory.
• Occasionally, you retrieve information to tell someone else about it or write it on a test or use it in some meaningful way.  The act of retrieval thickens the myelin on the neuron, which causes it to work faster.

The bad news is that you 

• Have limited working memory.
• Only remember things you work hard at.

The good news is that

• Pictures have power
• Spaced interleaved retrieval practice is the way to work hard.
• While you cannot increase your working memory capacity, you can trick it through chunking.

Let's talk about chunking for a minute.  Much of what you teach is related in a way that can be categorized.  Asking kids to do that will make their brains think of each category as an item.  

Since this post is getting a bit long, I'll do separate posts on dual coding and spaced and interleaved retrieval practice.