Learning, Knowledge and Human Development MOOC’s Updates

Apprehending Memory through Educational Psychology

Educational psychology applies to any educational system, not only the one that is at the forefront of our minds: the education of children, adolescents, and even young adults. For example, by taking an interest in memory, we can learn not only how children develop learning and memory devices, but also how these can degenerate at an advanced age.
Memory is categorized at several levels, the first of which differentiates between long-term and short-term memory (or working memory).

For Baddeley[1], working memory has four components:

  • Two slave systems, the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial notebook, each responsible for the temporary storage of specific information, respectively verbal and visuo-spatial;
  • An episodic buffer for temporary storage and integration of multimodal information from the slave systems and the episodic memory into episodic representations;
  • A central administrator, in charge of the attentional control of the action and allowing the coordination of information coming from other cognitive systems and the selection of the strategies to be applied.

Working memory is, in fact, a short-term system that allows the temporary processing of information useful for the current activity. It is therefore a limited and active memory, constantly updated.
It is used, for example and in a school setting, for text comprehension. Thus, by taking an interest in it, one can understand what methods are used by students to analyze information. It is particularly relevant to look at it when a problem arises: it is then necessary to "muscle" this memory and ensure that the complexity of the task is adapted to the student's neuroplasticity.

In long-term memory, there are still several levels, but we will content ourselves with the first: the notion of implicit and explicit memory.
The first is unconscious, it allows the acquisition of skills and the progressive improvement of motor performance, while the second, much more conscious, is the one that is called upon when one "searches in one's memory" for a particular memory. It is therefore often more related to an event or a notion.
Graf and Schacter[2] give a more precise definition of these two types of memory: "implicit memory appears when performance on a task is facilitated in the absence of conscious recollection of the influence of a previous instigating event, whereas explicit memory appears when performance on a task requires conscious recollection of previous events".
To give a crude example, explicit memory will then be remembering what we ate yesterday, while implicit memory will allow us to drive our car.

For learning, being interested in how memory works is of great interest. By understanding that we don't use the same memory to understand what a text contains, than the one we use to learn a new word, than the one we use to write, we acquire a new point of view on how to think about learning. Since it is not the same memory that is at stake, should we use the same exercises, the same methods, the same patience?
This opens up a new spectrum for learning.

 

Footnotes

  1. ^ Baddeley, A. (1992). Working memory. Science, 255(5044), 556‑559. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1736359
  2. ^ Graf, P., & Schacter, D. L. (1985). Implicit and explicit memory for new associations in normal and amnesic subjects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 11, 501-518. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037//0278-7393.11.3.501