One question I had from the reading was about the "working memory aspect". I understood sensory memory fairly well, but working memory confused me. I understand that the working memory holds 5-9 pieces of information that the brain deems as "more important" from the sensory memory, but I'm still very confused as to the process.
Learning, according to this theory, is when the brain gathers information, processes it, stores it, and then retrieves it. In other words, the brain gathers, through the senses, what's going on in a situation, processes it and chooses the most important details, stores those details, and then later is able to recall them. For me as a teacher, this means making sure I'm planning activities in which students are paying attention. When I'm trying to get across something extremely important, I need to somehow stress that they need to store this information. Also, using visuals can help students to remember things more effectively, and having students put things into their own words (for example, having a choir explain what went well or didn't about a piece, or what we should really focus on in a piece) helps students to store the information more effectively. Repetition is also very important!
When teaching a song on the recorder, this theory can be used very effectively. First, I would play the song numerous times, so that could hear it. I'd also have the music or words to the song in front of them so they could see it as a visual, and I'd have students finger along on their recorders so they could "feel" how the song goes. After playing the song more than once, I'd teach it to them in small sections, with a lot of repetition so they'd really get to learn it. I'd repeat important phrases numerous times, so that they'd really remember it. I'd also try and connect the recorder song to another song we've learned -- for example, explaining that it has the same notes as another song, or it has a similar melody to a song we've sung in class. This elaborative rehearsal would hopefully help. I'd also work on chunking - explaining which parts of the song repeat more than once, so they'd remember it more easily. To retrieve it once it's been stored, I could just play the first few notes, or play the repeated section we discussed in chunking - this would hopefully spark their memory of how to play the song.
I understand the confusion on working memory as well. What I was able to come up with on how it works is that our working memory is how we use the information that we have encoded and stored. It is our memory that we recall for the current task at hand. I agree with the visual aids and repetition for information storage. Those can also be ways to stress what is more important to encode for the students because even though a teacher may stress or say something is important a student may not deem it important so the repetition and multiple sensory information inputs will enhance the storage of the most important aspects of a given lesson. I had a similar lesson except mine was with a major scale. I used the same concepts though, audio, visual, and lots of repetition. This would help to truly encode the information so that they could just recall the scale or tune without needing cues.
ReplyDeleteWorking memory is just your short term memory. Little things that you probably won't remember or need to remember in a few minutes. If that information is needed, it becomes encoded into our long term memory.
ReplyDeleteIn my psychology class in high school, my teacher listed off a bunch of random words and numbers. After he did that, we had to write down the ones we remembered. Some people remembered about 5, some 7 and I remember one kid had 13. This is your short term memory at work, only remembering certain things that stuck out to you. The next day, he asked if we remembered any of the words. A few people knew some, because those words had been encoded into long term memory (probably based on the fact that we had to write them down... rehearsal!)
I think what Rebecca said is very clear. The working memory is the system for temporarily storing and managing information. This information is required to carry out cognitive tasks such as learning, reasoning, and comprehension. We use our working memory all day every day. The activity we did in the second blog prompt was a test of working memory (and one's memory span, or the number of items that a person can hold onto and recall). Working memory allows us to remember several pieces of information active while we try to do something else with them. People tend to think that there is a magic number 7, or that an adult has a working memory capacity of about 7 items. You can sort of think of the working memory as a worktable/desk area-- a place where you gather the information and can see what information you need to work with.
ReplyDeleteLike Rebecca said, working memory is, in essence, your short term memory in work. Working memory is just when your short term memory is actually put to work and recalls a certain answer that is needed for a test or homework assignment. It is always active and consists of many informational aspects, such as the central executive and the phonological loop, which focus attention and rehearses information to the person to help them recall and remember certain formulas and answers that they need at the time. This type of memory only holds 5-9 chunks of data at one time, which is different from the other types of memory.
ReplyDeleteSensory memory is everything you sense. You are constantly using all of your senses. They never stop sensing. Working memory is what you deem to be important enought to keep. (Think about your keyboard: do you think about how smooth the keys are when you type; I highly doubt you do.) You continually process everything and throw out what you don't think you need because then your brain would be overwhelmed.
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