Study Shows Information Is Easier To Learn When Composed of Familiar Elements
News
People have more difficulty recalling the string of letters BIC, IAJ, FKI, RSU and SAF than FBI, CIA, JFK, IRS and USA. The well-established reason is that the amount of information we can hold in our short-term or working memory is affected by whether the information can be "chunked" into larger units.
New research by Carnegie Mellon University psychologists takes this principle one step further by uncovering how the strength — or familiarity — of those chunks plays a crucial role. Published in Psychonomic Bulletin Review, the study shows for the first time that it is easier to learn new facts that are composed of more familiar chunks.
These findings have implications for how students are taught almost any subject, including second language learning. They also indicate that the long-held belief that children have less working memory than adults may not be true because working memory resources are more rapidly consumed when the chunks are less familiar.
This novel research merges instructional innovation and brain science, two of Carnegie Mellon's university-wide initiatives — the Simon Initiative, which aims to measurably improve student learning outcomes by harnessing decades of learning science research, and BrainHub, which focuses on how the structure and activity of the brain give rise to complex behaviors.
Read the full story on the Carnegie Mellon News website.
(Story by Shilo Rea)