Chunks are built in long term memory by practising similar but different questions.
The chunk, once built, holds linked information about a process both
information about the trigger or "perceptual cue" which helps us decide which chunks might be useful,
information about the process itself e.g. the order of the steps of process etc.
Much more powerfully we can build chunks of chunks etc.
What experts do - through deliberate practice and meta-thinking is build up chunks, chunks of chunks etc. which help them use their limited working memory to appear to have a huge capacity of working memory. They don't have more working memory, they just make very good use of their chunks, and are good at building new chunks, especially from existing chunks. Experts make excellent use of "the more you know, the more you can learn".
timely practice wants low attaining learners to be able to become more expert in their learning - but unlike the expert, who self guides their learning, we want the teacher to guide their learners' learning.
Gobet 2005Here I summarise and quote from Gobet, F. (2005). Chunking models of expertise: Implications for education. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19, 183-204. When I first came across Gobet and his summary of many researchers over many years in machine based learning - often applied to chess - I thought "how useful is that likely to be?" I was quite dismissive of using research about how best to computers to play chess to think about how best to teach low attaining learners about maths, but bear with me. Gobet says Without variation, schemata (or chunks) cannot be created. For example, in the case of elementary mathematics, presenting a narrow range of problems will hamper the acquisition of a sufficient variety of chunks and links connecting them, and, consequently, schemata are not likely to be formed. Chunk-based models actually warn us against any excess of optimism in the use of new technologies, as long as they do not help circumvent the key limiting constants of human cognition (i.e. attention, STM = working memory , and learning rates).
Hence timely practice's focus on a spiral of gently rising aspirations. Gobet goes on to talk about identifying the parts and the order to teach efficiently - which very much chimes with the most recent Ofsted obsession of "curriculum". A curriculum is only as good as the embedded learning resulting from it. If learners only retain a small proportion of what is taught, they are not following our carefully crafted curriculum - and their curriculum (with added holes), may well be making learning harder for the learner. Another important role for teachers is to provide feedback, an obvious way to highlight the important features of a problem, and thus favour the acquisition of correct knowledge. Clearly, this is easier to do with private instruction than in the classroom (Bloom, 1984) From Chunking Mechanisms and Learning Gobet, F. & Lane, P. (2012) I quote
By 2012 the chunk theory has been refined to become the template theory.
What Gobet and Lane don't discuss as a parameter varying between individuals is - how long learners retain learning for. A chunk or a template built in the past but now forgotten won't be useful to a learner - unless they can relearn it. |