UNDERSTANDING

MEMORY
AND
LEARNING
___________
REFLECTING ON GREAT TEACHING
 INTRODUCTION
Evidence Based Education’s Model for Great Teaching (page 2)
highlights the importance of students’ thinking. The model, derived from the
best available research evidence on effective teaching, dedicates an
entire dimension to this. Dimension 4 of the model argues that great
teachers “activate hard thinking” in their students (Coe et al., 2020). The
importance of thinking should come as no surprise to any educator (or
indeed anyone who has ever been to school!); it is, of course, at the core
of learning.

Thinking is something we do all the time—without really thinking about it,

somewhat ironically. We think when we talk to people, listen to the radio,
watch television, or even just look out of a window. You’re thinking as you
read this. And of course, our students think when in our class (hopefully
about the lesson and intended learning).

We know that if we “think hard,” then learning can take place. But how
does this happen? What is the link between thinking, learning, and
remembering?

This eBook discusses the very basics of these concepts. The science of
learning is an extensive field that draws from research in disciplines like
psychology, education, neuroscience, and even sociology and computer
science. This eBook will not extend into every detail of learning and
cognition; instead, it does offer an introduction that every teacher can use
as a starting point.

We know that learning is absolutely crucial to education—therefore

teachers can use their understanding of how it happens to better consider
their classroom practice. This eBook concludes with some practical steps
and considerations for teachers to implement on a daily basis.

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A Model for Great Teaching
1. Understanding the content
Having deep and fluent Knowledge of the requirements Knowledge of relevant curriculum
1 knowledge and flexible
2 of curriculum sequencing and
3 tasks, assessments and activities,
understanding of the content you dependencies in relation to their diagnostic and didactic
are teaching the content and ideas you are potential; being able to generate
teaching varied explanations and multiple
Knowledge of common student representations/analogies/
4 strategies, misconceptions and examples for the ideas you are
sticking points in relation to the teaching
content you are teaching

2. Creating a supportive environment

Promoting interactions and Promoting a positive climate of Creating a climate of high
1 relationships with all students that
2 student-student relationships,
4 expectations, with high challenge
are based on mutual respect, care, characterised by respect, trust, and high trust, so learners feel it is
empathy and warmth; avoiding cooperation and care okay to have a go; encouraging
negative emotions in interactions learners to attribute their success
with students; being sensitive to the Promoting learner motivation or failure to things they can
individual needs, emotions, culture
3 through feelings of competence, change
and beliefs of students autonomy and relatedness

3. Maximising opportunity to learn

Managing time and resources Ensuring that rules, expectations Preventing, anticipating &
1 efficiently in the classroom to
2 and consequences for behaviour
3 responding to potentially
maximise productivity and are explicit, clear and consistently disruptive incidents; reinforcing
minimise wasted time (e.g., applied positive student behaviours;
starts, transitions); giving clear signalling awareness of what is
instructions so students understand happening in the classroom and
what they should be doing; using responding appropriately
(and explicitly teaching) routines
to make transitions smooth

4. Activating hard thinking

Structuring: giving students Explaining: presenting and Questioning: using questions and
1 an appropriate sequence of
2 communicating new ideas
3 dialogue to promote elaboration
learning tasks; signalling learning clearly, with concise, appropriate, and connected, flexible thinking
objectives, rationale, overview, engaging explanations; among learners (e.g., ‘Why?’,
key ideas and stages of progress; connecting new ideas to what ‘Compare’, etc.); using questions
matching tasks to learners’ has previously been learnt (and to elicit student thinking; getting
needs and readiness; scaffolding re-activating/checking that prior responses from all students;
and supporting to make tasks knowledge); using examples (and using high-quality assessment to
accessible to all, but gradually non-examples) appropriately evidence learning; interpreting,
removed so that all students to help learners understand and communicating and responding
succeed at the required level build connections; modelling/ to assessment evidence
demonstrating new skills or appropriately
procedures with appropriate
scaffolding and challenge; using
worked/part-worked examples

Interacting: responding Embedding: giving students tasks Activating: helping students

4 appropriately to feedback from
5 that embed and reinforce learning;
6 to plan, regulate and monitor
students about their thinking/ requiring them to practise until their own learning; progressing
knowledge/understanding; giving learning is fluent and secure; appropriately from structured to
students actionable feedback to ensuring that once-learnt material more independent learning as
guide their learning is reviewed/revisited to prevent students develop knowledge and
forgetting expertise

Evidence Based
Education Great Teaching Toolkit greatteaching.com
WHAT IS LEARNING?

When we talk about learning,

we may think about our brain
creating mental models,
connecting concepts, ideas,
and information together into
knowledge structures.

For example, a student can develop a mental model of the mathematical

concept of pi (π). This may include the knowledge that A = π x r², the digits
of pi. More developed mental models may recognise how pi is derived or
its relation to trigonometric functions.

Learning then refers to the relatively permanent changes to these mental

models, which are available to us for future use. These changes include
the addition of new information, the change of existing knowledge, or the
connection to other mental models.

We say that learning should be relatively permanent—the changes to the

mental model should persist over time. If we taught this student more
about right triangles, we’d want them to remember it in subsequent days,
weeks, months, and even years. If they came in the next day and did not
remember it, of course we would not say they had learned it, even if they
had understood the day before.

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HOW DOES LEARNING HAPPEN?

The human brain is incredible—it has the processing power of a modern

supercomputer, but fits inside your head and can run for a few hours on
just a banana (Wu, et al., 2016). Aside from controlling our voluntary and
involuntary movements, the brain has the primary responsibility for
cognitive functions. These are processes relating to knowledge, thinking,
and interpreting the world around us. Our brains allow us to continuously
perceive, process, and respond to stimuli.

To describe how brains learn, we can use a model of cognitive functions

and processes to describe what happens. In this model, there are three
cognitive functions that are particularly relevant; there are three related
cognitive systems that provide these functions:

The attention system selects the most relevant information.

Working memory processes the information.
Long-term memory stores the information.

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The attention system
Our senses are constantly bombarded by stimuli. Of course, this includes
the senses we regularly think of—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—but
our bodies rely on even more senses. We also have a sense of balance,
temperature, proprioception (i.e., a sense of body position), pain, and
internal senses (e.g., hunger, thirst, nausea), to name a few.

The attention system selects information from the environment. Some

things we choose to focus on; for example, we may focus attention on
someone we’re speaking to in a noisy room. Some stimuli draw our
attention—think of what happens when you hear a ping from your phone.

The attention system is an effective filter; most stimuli are either not
attended to or are quickly lost. Think of an annoying hum in the
background—often, your attention system can “tune out” the noise and
allow you to focus on other stimuli.

The attention system’s capacity is limited. Think about how that ping from
your phone draws you away from what you were doing; you may no longer
notice what someone is saying to you or what is happening around you. In
particularly noisy settings, we may need to devote extra attention to focus
on relevant stimuli. Furthermore, our attention naturally wanes over time.
When this happens, we could make a conscious decision to renew it, but
this requires a reason for us to do so.

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When we use any of our cognitive systems for the goal of learning, we
naturally would want to maximise their effectiveness. We can do this for
our attention system with various simple techniques—whether for our own
learning, or within our classrooms:

Avoid and actively reduce external distractions in learning

environments. Silence phones and minimise background noises.
Anything that isn’t relevant to the learning can be a source of
distraction.
Find ways to draw attention to, and focus on, the most relevant
information. Say phrases like, “This is important!” or place written
instructions clearly front and centre. Point to key components of
diagrams.
Acknowledge that we are only aware of some of the information in our
environment. Don’t assume a student noticed something just because
it was on the board.

The information we do successfully attend is then passed to our working

memory.

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Working memory
Working memory is the space where we work with memory – it's responsible
for processing information. This information either comes from the
attention system or from long-term memory. Processing information
requires a conscious effort—it’s the thinking that is crucial for memory
formation to take place. When it comes to deliberate learning, if
something is not processed by working memory, it has very little chance of
successfully being encoded into long-term memory.

Our working memory has a very limited capacity (especially if you are a
novice learner of something). If our working memory’s capacity is
exceeded, information is lost. Obviously lost information is not conducive
to learning, so we want to minimise overtaxing working memory!

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Novices and experts
Novices and experts on a topic handle new information differently.
Experts’ mental models are more developed; they contain greater amounts
of knowledge which is better organised. They also have greater
experience of using this knowledge—perhaps even to the point of
automaticity. An individual’s place on the novice-expert continuum varies
by domain, content, and topic.

Regardless of where someone falls between novice and expert, these

cognitive processes still work the same way. However, differences remain
in how we handle new knowledge. A novice learner in a topic has a less
developed mental model; as a result, their working memory can get taxed
more readily. Experts are also able to use their existing prior knowledge to
help “chunk” information.

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Working memory capacity does vary between people; while you can’t do
“brain exercises” to expand this capacity, adults’ working memory is
naturally greater than that of children. Research suggests that when
dealing with unfamiliar items, most people’s working memory capacity is
around 3-4 items (the psychologist George Miller first posited it may be 7
items, plus or minus 2; but later studies refined this down to our modern
estimate).

Three or four items is not a lot, given that an item is a small piece of
information! However, our brains are able to chunk information—we can
combine a number of items into a new, single item. Having prior
knowledge related to items allows us to group them together. They could
be grouped together by related meanings (e.g., when remembering a
grocery list, we can think of apples and bananas as one item: fruit) or by
familiarity (e.g., L-M-N-O-P is more familiar than a random assortment of
five letters).

As an illustration, imagine the difficulty in trying to remember this

alphanumeric string:

MI6CIA007KGB

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You may have a good deal of difficulty if each character were its own item
in your working memory! Perhaps you noticed some familiar combinations
or characters—maybe you even noticed some shared meanings between
these letters. Is it different trying to remember the same sequence, but
chunked into familiar concepts?

M I 6 C I A 007 KGB
Chunking does not just refer to numbers or letters, but any information or
concept. Processes or sequences of events, hierarchies of knowledge, or
related ideas can all be chunked. Simply chunking information does not
mean that we will remember it—it is a way to lighten the load on our
working memory’s limited capacity. However, this does mean that we are
less likely to lose information due to over-capacity.

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Examples of “chunks”

Put water in kettle

Turn on kettle
Take out mug
Put tea bag in mug
Making a cup of tea Wait for kettle to boil
Pour water in mug
Let steep
Remove teabag
Add a dash of milk

Exit front door

Turn right
Walk 200 metres to bus stop
Board #7 bus
Commute to work
Travel 12 stops
Get off bus
Turn right
Walk 50 metres to the school

Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Taxonomy Order
Family
Genus
Species

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Long-term memory
Unlike working memory or the attentional system, our long-term memory
has no limit (as far as we know). It is responsible for storing our memories
and knowledge. The information it stores can be categorised as one of two
types of memory: declarative (or explicit) memory and nondeclarative
memory.

Declarative memory is memory of facts, events, and concepts; they’re the

items in our memory we can explicitly declare or say that we know. We can
further divide declarative memory into episodic memory and semantic
memory. The former refers to our ability to remembers specific events or
episodes. Semantic memory describes general knowledge—that is,
concepts, facts, or ideas that can be explicitly communicated.

Nondeclarative, or implicit, memory is knowledge that is based on prior

experiences: procedures and processes that we can draw on without the
relevant information entering our consciousness. In fact, one significant
type of nondeclarative memory is procedural memory: knowing how to do
things.

While distinct types of memory, they are closely linked. For example:
You can hold an episodic memory of an afternoon when someone
taught you how to play chess.
You can hold semantic memory of the rules of the chess pieces’
movement.
You can hold procedural memory of how to play chess.

Not all information that our brains receive will enter our long-term memory.
We say that information is encoded into long-term memory when we
process it in our working memory. Even then, our long-term retention of
that information is not guaranteed!

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The cognitive systems and learning
Learning allows us to register information from life experiences in our
memory and to react more effectively in the future. We can think of
learning as a goal: the long-term retention of information and the ability to
transfer it to the novel situations we find ourselves in during the course of
life.

We can think of the attention system, working memory, and long-term each
as “insufficient but necessary” parts of the whole process. Each system is
crucial for learning to happen; each system is also dependent on the
others to work.

Key to this model of learning is the idea of forming connections between

information. This means that learners must be able to make connections
between new information and what they already know. Without secure
prior knowledge, learners struggle to be able to place incoming knowledge
and form connections in long term memory. Readily accessible prior
knowledge also helps alleviate the load on working memory. Learners with
more expertise and prior knowledge on a topic can more easily select
which relevant information to attend to in their environment. We know that
learning does not occur in a vacuum—prior knowledge is a key additional
factor that is required.

You may be aware of topics or principles related

to memory and learning. Cognitive load theory,
Rosenshine’s principles, or Mayer’s principles are
popular among educators. These are not in
competition, but can offer teachers practical
considerations or understandings based on this
model of memory and learning. Many of these
use the limitations of working memory as a key
foundation of their framework. This knowledge of
how the cognitive systems work for memory and
learning can help you better implement these in
your practice.

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Final thoughts
With this awareness of the cognitive systems that work together for
memory and learning, you may find yourself modifying your instructional
design. As you do, consider the following key points:

Only information that we consciously attend to in our environment can

pass into working memory for processing.
The process of learning in the brain happens continuously (most of the
time we're not even aware of this). If we want to learn something
deliberately though, we have to select the specific information needed
for processing to give us a chance at developing it into knowledge.
If we want to learn something deliberately but we attend to irrelevant
information, not only do we risk developing misconceptions, but we
also use up vital working memory capacity—which then can’t be used
to process the accurate, relevant information.
Cognitive overload prevents relevant information being properly
processed in working memory, items that are not properly processed
are not encoded into long-term memory.

It is also crucial for teachers to remember that learning is invisible. These

cognitive processes are unseen, by both teachers and learners.
Furthermore, just because we incorporate these understandings of
cognitive systems into our instruction does not mean that learning will
automatically take place. Teachers still must employ high-quality
assessments to build an understanding of what learning has actually taken
place.

As The Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review argues, anyone can get
better at anything—including teachers (Coe et al., 2020). Developing your
understanding of models of learning and memory are a great step in
becoming an even greater teacher.

Applying these understandings to your own practice are a feature of being

an evidence-informed teacher. And in doing so, you can increase student
learning and outcomes in your classroom.

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References & further reading
Coe, R., Rauch, C.J., Kime, S., & Singleton, D. (2020). The Great Teaching
Toolkit: Evidence Review. https://evidencebased.education/great-
teaching-toolkit/

Baddeley, A. & Hitch, G. J. (2010) Working memory. Scholarpedia,

5(2):3015.

Baddeley, A. (2012). Working memory: theories, models, and controversies.

Annual review of psychology, 63, 1-29.

Medin, D. L., Ross, B. H., & Markman, A. B. (2005). Cognitive psychology.

Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Chapters 5,6.

Willingham, D. T. (2009). Why don't students like school?: A cognitive

scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means
for the classroom. John Wiley & Sons. Ch.2

Wu, T., Dufford, A. J., Mackie, M.-A., Egan, L. J., & Fan, J. (2016). The
Capacity of Cognitive Control Estimated from a Perceptual Decision
Making Task. Scientific Reports, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep34025

To cite this ebook, please use:

Evidence Based Education. (2022). What every teacher needs to know
about learning and memory.

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