Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Working Memory
During one of my recent proffesional development seminars, I learned that many high school seniors have extremely short "spans." A span is the amount of items one can hold in their short term memory at one time. The teacher running the proffessional development seminar said that it is usual for her seniors to have a span of 2. The average adult, today, has a span of 5 to 7. Her argument was that young people do not need to memorize things anymore-- they just jot it in their cell phone for later. I am very interested in this phenomena. As a future biology teacher, I know that students must be able to manipulate multiple vocabulary words at once to build complex ideas. If students are only able to keep two ideas in their head at once, how are they to build the connections between ideas necessary for long term memory retrieval? I love that technology has helped people stay organized and have vasts amounts of information at our fingertips. I think students may need some old school practice, though, on how to think about multiple things at once in order to create thinking schemes. I could be wrong, though. If people have access to technology all of the time, could they use it as pseudo working memory? This new information is particularly important to me because I am in a discipline with many new vocabulary words and facts. I believe these terms and ideas need to clumped into categories, a mental schema, and linked or spiraled to many other concepts for full understanding. However, I was thinking of having roughly five over arching categories each time...I think only two categories could be limiting. I definitely need to do more research on the topic.
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I can totally see this span-thing at work in my classes. I teach an accelerated American Studies class and a lot of the kids are really behind when they get to the test because they can't even cram anymore! Sadly, we don't have study skills classes to help them figure out how to study for tests in a way that converts short term to long term. I'm not sure if this is a struggle with span or not, but I have my suspicions...
ReplyDeleteWhat an interesting topic! Only two thoughts at once, that seems incredibly low! And I think you are absolutely right; biology is so rich in vocabulary that students will need to juggle so many terms and ideas at once to reach a higher level of thinking. If it is true that high school students can only hold two thoughts at once, you definitely have your work cut out for you. But I know you will find a good balance between the "old school" style and "new school" technology.
ReplyDeleteMeghan, great post!
ReplyDeleteCombined with overall short attention spans, I think this is a real issue that makes school difficult for kids today. Part of the problem is that people don't want to have to memorize anything because it takes effort. This whole anti-effort culture is disturbing.
It's really interesting to consider how our definition of what it means to educated and equipped for learning will change as we contemplate the fact that a large body of knowledge is, in at least some senses, accessible to all. Our criteria for assessing mastery over a subject will have to change at least a little...I would hope! I suppose that not only will things be complicated in interesting ways from this perspective, but it stands to reason that the role of the teacher might change, too. It's a bit of a cliche at this point to conjecture about the "guide on the side" as contrasted with the "sage on the stage" but one would hope that some re-conceptualization of the respective roles is in the offing, and that will be a very interesting thing for you to witness and be a part of.
ReplyDeleteWell, I think sometimes kids get the bad rep of low attention spans because often they need to be amused or invested in what they are doing to pay attention to for a long period of time. But regardless of the technology, I think kids can still have nice elongated attention spans. They'll just have to practice. :)
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