Information about education provided online, with recent results of scientific research and useful information for teachers, parents, students and the general public. Contributing to an informed debate.
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.
Cindy Nebel
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When Revising, Read Out Loud
Very frequently, I give writers (my students) the advice that they should read their work out loud while revising. I give this advice because it helps me to catch errors in writing, but I did not have evidence to back up my advice… until now.
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Can we boost elaboration with retrieval practice?
If you want to combine elaboration and retrieval practice, don’t just have students answer elaborative questions without being able to retrieve the answers.