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One this that confused me in the reading was when the book mentioned the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketchpad. At first, I thought of them as actual machine or model and then I realized it might be something within our brains. Especially when it mentioned the newest addition in the model was the episodic buffer. I don’t understand what any of these are and I don’t really think they were defined clearly. I just thought the entire paragraph was confusing, and I still don’t really know what they were trying to say!
In the information processing theory, learning is basically how we encode and retain information that we encounter every day. Our brains are kind of like a computer, the way that we store and retrieve information. Some information you don’t really notice or forget about easily, because you didn’t save it since it wasn’t that important. While others, you save and put in your documents folder and it stays there forever and you can open it up when you please. Learning is taking sensory information and focusing on it. That turns it into working memory, which you have a limited amount of time to decide if you want to store it or not. The information then becomes encoded and stored in your long term memory. To teach, you need to realize that the information isn’t automatically encoded. The focus and attention, especially on young children, needs to be there. From there, it is there for the short term. Using fun mnemonics and acronyms helps students encode and store the information. I still remember order of operations, or PEMDAS from math class (Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally!) because of this type of learning.
Let’s say I am trying to teach students a chemical equation for chemistry. First, to catch their attention, I would set up a demonstration where they could actually see a reaction take place. I would use something that would probably be big, loud and colorful. This would get their sensory memory focused and start on their working memory. Since they only have a short amount of time to remember information in this stage, I would explain what the elements are in the reaction and make sure to repeat them a few times. This should help them encode the information. Since they have actually seen the reaction and it held their attention, they will remember what happened. And since I repeated and rehearsed what elements are in the reaction, they should remember that as well.
To answer your question...
ReplyDeleteFrom the reading, I believe that visuospatial sketchpad, phonological loop, etc. are all components of the working memory. These components allow an individual to do 2 things at once, where you can store the information for a longer period of time. They gave an example in the book: reading and listening to music at the same time. The phonological loop is for auditory which stores auditory information and rehearses it, to increase your chances of remembering it. The visuospatial sketchpad is for visual and spatial information. The eposidic buffer combines all the processes in the memory together and integrates them. This is what I understood about this concept, I may be incorrect, but I hope this helps. I have to agree that it is very confusing and not clearly written.