The Box Metaphor for Working Memory

How many boxes can you hold? Late last year, I went to a talk by Dr. Sarah Oberle where she posed this question and I have been using a modified version of this metaphor ever since. It is clearly a trick question. The answer, like so many things in our complex world of education is, of course, it depends. It depends on several factors that match up quite nicely with the same questions of what we can hold in working memory. Below I’ll walk through a few of these and hopefully it will give you a better way of thinking about working memory as well.