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What key learning did you take from...

Case Study 1 – Helen Lewis –   Developing metacognition in young children

Case Study 2 - Josie Morgan –  Cognitive load theory in a practical classroom

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Metacognition and self-regulation approaches to teaching support pupils to think about their own learning

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From any of your completed formative assessment tasks (FATs) from Teaching, Subject and Curriculum, Assessment or Developing Primary Maths...

How do you and colleagues use misconceptions to develop the quality of your pupils thinking?

Identify any emerging points that you need to address as a leader of learning?

How do you share models for assessment in your context?

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Activity 2 - With a focus on the Domain Digest – Teaching,

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Activity 2 - With a focus on the Domain Digest – Teaching,

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Which research are you familiar with or reflects your school’s current practice?

Which research or example challenged your current practice? i.e., consideration of working memory, effective questioning.

What were your key takeaways from the domain digest, research, formative assessments or case study?

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Working memory is the small amount of information that can be held in mind and used in the execution of cognitive tasks, in contrast with long-term memory, the vast amount of information saved in one's life. Working memory is one of the most widely-used terms in psychology. It has often been connected or related to intelligence, information processing, executive function, comprehension, problem-solving, and learning, in people ranging from infancy to old age and in all sorts of animals. This concept is so omnipresent in the field that it requires careful examination both historically and in terms of definition, to establish its key characteristics and boundaries. By weaving together history, a little philosophy, and empirical work in psychology, in this opening section I hope to paint a clear picture of the concept of working memory. In subsequent sections, implications of working memory for cognitive development, learning, and education will be discussed in turn, though for these broad areas it is only feasible to touch on certain examples.

Some researchers emphasize the possibility of training working memory to improve learning and education. In this chapter, I take the complementary view that we must learn how to adjust the materials to facilitate learning and education with the working memory abilities that the learner has. Organizing knowledge, for example, reduces one's memory load because the parts don't have to be held in mind independently.

Take, for example, the possibility of doing some scouting ahead so that you will know what this article is about, making your task of reading easier. If you tried to read through the headings of this article, you might have trouble remembering them (placing them all in working memory) so as to anticipate how they fit together. If you read , though, it is an attempt to help you organize the information. If it helps you associate the ideas to one another to build a coherent framework, it should help you read by reducing the working-memory load you experience while reading. In doing so, you are building a rich structure to associate the headings with one another in long-term memory (e.g., Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995), which reduces the number of ideas that would have to be held independently in working memory in order to remember the organization.

Early History of Working Memory Research

In 1690, John Locke distinguished between contemplation, or holding an idea in mind, and memory, or the power to revive an idea after it has disappeared from the mind ( Logie, 1996). The holding in mind is limited to a few concepts at once and reflects what is now called working memory, as opposed to the possibly unlimited store of knowledge from a lifetime that is now called long-term memory. Working memory can be defined as the small amount of information that can be held in an especially accessible state and used in cognitive tasks.

Philosophers have long been interested in the limits of what can be contemplated, as noted by a leading British economist and logician, William Stanley Jevons. In an article in Science in 1871, he mused (p. 281): "It is well known that the mind is unable through the eye to estimate any large number of objects without counting them successively. A small number, for instance three or four, it can certainly comprehend and count by an instantaneous and apparently single act of mental attention." Then he devised a little experiment to test this hypothesis, on himself. On each trial, he casually reached into a jar full of beans, threw several beans onto a table, and tried to estimate their number without counting. After 1,027 trials, he made no errors for sets of 3 or 4 beans, with some small errors for sets of 5 beans, and with increasing magnitudes of error as a function of set size thereafter, up to 15 beans. Despite the problematic nature of the method (in that the bean thrower was also the bean judge), the finding that normal adults typically can keep in mind only about 3 or 4 items has been replicated many times in modern research, using methods similar to Jevons (e.g., Mandler & Shebo, 1982) and using many other methods ( Cowan, 2001). The limited amount that could be held in mind at once played an important role in early experimental psychology, e.g., in the early experimental work of Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885/1913) and Wilhelm Wundt (1894/1998). On the American front, William James (1890) wrote about a distinction between primary memory, the items in consciousness and the trailing edge of what is perceived in the world, and secondary memory, the items in storage but not currently in consciousness. Recent investigators have considered multiple possible reasons why primary memory might be limited to just a few items at once, including biological accounts based on the need to avoid confusion between concurrent objects in memory, and evolutionary and teleological accounts based on ideas about what capacity might be ideal for learning and memory retrieval ( Cowan, 2010; Sweller, 2011), but as yet the reason is unknown.

Ubiquity of the Working Memory Concept

When we say that working memory holds a small amount of information, by this term we may be referring to something as abstract as ideas that can be contemplated, or something as concrete as objects that can be counted (e.g., beans). The main point of information is that it is the choice of some things out of a greater set of possible things. One of the exciting aspects of working memory is that it may be important on so many different levels, and in so many different situations. When you are listening to language, you need to retain information about the beginning of the sentence until you can make sense of it. If you hear Jean would like to visit the third building on the left you need to recall that the actor in the sentence is Jean. Then you need to retain the verb until you know what it is she would like to visit, and you need to retain the adjective "third" until you know, third what; and all of the pieces must be put together in the right way. Without sufficient working memory, the information would be lost before you could combine it into a coherent, complete thought. As another example of how working memory is used, when doing simple arithmetic in your head, if you want to add 24 and 18 you may need to find that 4+8=12, retain the 2 while carrying the 1 over to the tens column to make 2+1+1=4 in the tens column, and integrate with the ones columns to arrive at the answer, 42. As a third example, if you are searching for your car in a parking lot, you have to remember the layout of the cars in the region you just searched so that you can avoid wasting time searching the same region again. In the jungle, a predator that turns its vision away from a scene and revisits it moments later may use working memory to detect that something in the scene has shifted; this change detection may indicate the presence of prey.

So the information in working memory can range from spoken words and printed digits to cars and future meals. It can even encompass abstract ideas. Consider whether a young child can get a good understanding of what is or is not a tiger (a matter of word category concepts, e.g., Nelson, 1974; Saltz, Soller, & Sigel, 1972). The concept is, in lay terms, a big cat with stripes. It excludes lions, which have no stripes, and it excludes zebras, which are not big cats. The child must be able to keep in mind the notion of a cat and the notion of stripes at the same time in order to grasp the tiger concept correctly. If the child thinks only of the stripes, he or she may incorrectly label a zebra as a tiger. The concept presumably starts out in working memory and, once it is learned, is transferred to long-term memory. At first, an incomplete concept might be stored in long-term memory, leading to misconceptions that are corrected later when discrepancies with further input are noticed and working memory is used to amend the concept in long-term memory. On a more abstract plane, there are more semantic issues mastered somewhat later in childhood (e.g., Clark & Garnica, 1974). The concept of bringing something seems to require several conditions: the person doing the bringing must have something at a location other than the speaker's location (or future planned location), and must accompany that thing to the speaker's location. You can ask the person to bring a salad to your house, but probably not to take a salad to your house (unless you are not there), and not to send a salad to your house (unless they are not coming along). These conditions can tax working memory. Again, the child's initial concept transferred from working memory to long-term memory may be incomplete, and amended later when discrepancies with further input are noticed.

Working Memory: The Past 64 Years

There are several modern beginnings for the working memory concept. Hebb (1949) had an outlook on temporary memory that was more neurologically based than the earlier concept of primary memory of James (1890). He spoke of ideas as mediated by assemblies of cells firing in a specific pattern for each idea or concept, and only a few cell assemblies would be active, with current neural firing, at any moment. This vision has played an important role in the field. An issue that is raised by this work is whether working memory should be identified with all of the active information that can be used in immediate memory tests, whether conscious or not, or whether it should be reserved to describe only the conscious information, more in the flavor of James. Given that working memory is a term usually used to explain behavioral outcomes rather than subjective reports, it is typically not restricted to conscious primary memory (e.g., see Baddeley, 1986; Baddeley & Hitch, 1974; Cowan, 1988). Cowan explicitly suggested that there are two aspects of working memory storage: (1) the activated portion of long-term memory, perhaps corresponding to Hebb's active cell assemblies, and (2) within that activated portion, a smaller subset of items in the focus of attention. The activated memory would consist of a fragmented soup of all kinds of activated features (sensory, phonological, orthographic, spatial, and semantic), whereas the focus of attention would contain just a few well-integrated items or chunks.

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Working Memory Underpins Cognitive Development, Learning, and Education

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Working memory is the small amount of information that can be held in mind and used in the execution of cognitive tasks, in contrast with long-term memory, the vast amount of information saved in one's life. Working memory is one of the most widely-used terms in psychology.

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Great Teaching Toolkit Evidence Review  

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Great Teaching Toolkit Evidence Review  

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Discuss these points below and nominate 1 person to feedback to the rest of the group.

Which research are you familiar with or reflects your school’s current practice?

Which research or example challenged your current practice? i.e., consideration of working memory, effective questioning.

What were your key takeaways from the domain digest, research, formative assessments or case study?

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While many personal, family, and cultural factors contribute to learners' academic performance, a large body of research indicates that teachers matter more to their achievement than any other aspect of their education. The quality of teaching is hugely important to the outcomes of students.

On 19th June 2020, Evidence Based Education released the Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review - a credible evidence summary of the elements of great teaching practice. The review provides a structured point of reference for the things teachers do, know, or believe, which have been found to be related to how well their students learn. The overarching goal here is to help teachers take ownership of their professional learning and to help them enhance their practice for the benefit of students.

In this interview, we speak to the review's lead author to hear him describe the dimensions of great teaching and how the evidence informed their development.

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In the Great Teaching Toolkit Evidence Review we review the best bets for teachers to invest time and effort in if they want their students to learn more.

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Case study 1 - Talking out loud and specific lessons on good thinking. Sometimes we assume that children know what thinking looks like.

Case study 2 - Silent modelling is good for helping with cognitive overload if children already understand the steps.

Modelling with explanations helps children understand what they need to do.

Some children have the maturity to know what they need to learn.

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individuality

flexibility of thought

PD in schools

teachers innate, care and tune in

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Activity 1a:

Same day maths interventions . Children to reflect with modelled examples. Children are less worried about going into the next maths lesson. Live marking in the moment so misconceptions can be addressed that day.

Showing children how to solve arithmetic questions and addressing those misconceptions to improve their accuracy.