Mathematics 1228A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Long-Term Memory, Automaticity, Rote Learning
29 Apr 2018
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5: Psychology and Education
BASIC ASSUMPTIONS OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
▪ Cognitive Psychology (cognitivists): focuses on the mental processes that are behind behaviour
and learning
▪ Cognitive processes affect nature of what's learned
▪ Internal and mental
▪ Information Processing Theory: how people think about and "process" the info they receive
a. It's easier to learn information if they can relate it to something they already know
b. New information is easier to learn when it can be related to an overall organizational
structure
▪ Students are selective about what they process ad learn
▪ Sensation: ability to sense stimuli
▪ Perception: interpretation of stimuli
o What the body senses isn't always perceived
▪ Constructivism: people apply what they already know to make sense of new material (marble
building)
o No student will understand material exactly the way the teacher taught it
o Some may even learn misinformation (fucking marble building)
o Ask questions, monitor, dialogue to make sure they on right track
▪ Prior knowledge and beliefs play major role in the meanings people create (subjective)
▪ Have to put in mental work/be involved in learning in order to learn
BASIC TERMINOLOGY IN COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
• Memory: ability to "sae" hat’s preiously been learned or mental location where such info is
saved
• Storage: "putting" new info into memory
• Encoding: modifying what we learn as it's being stored in memory
o E.g., when you listen to a story, you picture some of the events in your mind
o Assigning meaning/interpretations to stimuli and events
o We don't store info exactly the way it was presented
• Store gist (general meaning), not word for word (this tendency increases with age)
• Ex: Auditory Visual (or vice versa)
• Retrieval: process of "finding" info previously stored in memory
o Some things easy to retrieve (name), some need effort, others may never be retrieved even
if it was stored
A MODEL OF HUMAN MEMORY
• Human memory has 3 components: sensory register, a working memory (STM), and long term
memory
• The Nature of the Sensory Register
o Sensory Register: holds the original input in its unencoded form
• Takes in everything: what we see, hear, and sense is stored in SR
o Can hold lots at once - large capacity
o Info stored here don't last long
• Auditory info: lasts 2-3 secs—lasts longer
• Visual info: less than 1 sec
o It needs to move to working memory to keep it for longer
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• Moving Information to Working Memory
o Attention: Whatever you give you attention to will move into working memory
• First steps of making sensory info memorable = giving it attention
• No attention in SR = bye-bye
o Cocktail Party Phenomenon: can only attend to 1 thing at a time
• Students talking + teacher: you can only learn from one of these
o Limited capacity - people can perform only 2-3 automatic tasks at once (walk and chew
gum)
• Only 1 task if task is complex (driving on icy road or pay attention to an audio lecture)
• Small amount moves into WM from SR because of its limited capacity
• Most of what goes into our SR is lost
o Attention in the Classroom
• Attention = mental process, attention ≠ (overt) behavior
• How to make sure students are paying attention:
▪ Ask questions - kids pay more attention when they know they'll be tested
▪ Tell students to put new material to use (solve a problem)
▪ Make them take notes (makes them pay more attention to what they're
hearing/reading)
▪ Reconstruct: make notes in own words w/o using original notes (and then
revise/compare them w original for better learning experience)
▪ Make students come up with questions and evaluate each other's answers
("learning cell")
▪ Students who have hard time focusing do better when seated close to teacher
(niga)
• Students pay more attention when: different ways to learn material,
teacher is lively/enthusiastic
▪ Give students mental breathers
• The Nature of Working (Short-Term) Memory
o Working Memory (STM): where new info stays while it's processed (temporary holding bin
for new info)
• Short duration (5-20 secs max)
• Maintenance rehearsal: repeating something (phone #) over and over again (the
second you stop repeating, it goes away)
• Lasts only 1/2 a minute - needs to be processed more if you want it to stay
longer
Limited capacity
• Working memories can only retain so much in a given amount of time
• Teachers should keep this in mind - don't go too fast
• Students only learn 1 out 6 ideas from each minute of lecture - which means
students have to choose which idea to remember out of the 6 and they aren't
the best judges of what to remember and what to forget
o Where most of thinking/cognitive processes take place
Ex: making sense of instructions, solving a problem, understanding something they
read (app)
o Does most of the work of the memory system
• Moving Information to Long Term Memory: Connecting Information with Prior Knowledge
o To store new info in LTM, you need to use what you already know ("old info)
Arrows go in both directions bw LTM and WM
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
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