Why We Remember What We Remember

Short Term Memory. There are typically six reasons why information is stored in our short term memory.

primacy effect – information that occurs first is typically remembered better than information occurring later. When given a list of words or numbers, the first word or number is usually remembered due to rehearsing this more than other information.

recency effect – often the last bit of information is remembered better because not as much time has past; time which results in forgetting.

distinctiveness – if something stands out from information around it, it is often remembered better. Any distinctive information is easier to remember than that which is similar, usual, or mundane.

frequency effect – rehearsal, as stated in the first example, results in better memory. Remember trying to memorize a formula for your math class. The more you went over it, the better you knew it.

associations – when we associate or attach information to other information it becomes easier to remember. Many of us use this strategy in our professions and everyday life in the form of acronyms.

reconstruction – sometimes we actually fill in the blanks in our memory. In other words, when trying to get a complete picture in our minds, we will make up the missing parts, often without any realization that this is occurring.

Long Term Memory. Information that passes from our short term to our long term memory is typically that which has some significance attached to it. Imagine how difficult it would be to forget the day you graduated, or your first kiss. Now think about how easy it is to forget information that has no significance; the color of the car you parked next to at the store or what shirt you wore last Thursday. When we process information, we attach significance to it and information deemed important is transferred to our long term memory.

There are other reasons information is transferred. As we all know, sometimes our brains seem full of insignificant facts. Repetition plays a role in this, as we tend to remember things more the more they are rehearsed. Other times, information is transferred because it is somehow attached to something significant. You may remember that it was a warm day when you bought your first car. The temperature really plays no important role, but is attached to the memory of buying your first car.

Forgetting

You can’t talk about remembering without mentioning its counterpart. It seems that as much as we do remember, we forget even more. Forgetting isn’t really all that bad, and is in actuality, a pretty natural phenomenon. Imagine if you remembered every minute detail of every minute or every hour, of every day during your entire life, no matter how good, bad, or insignificant. Now imagine trying to sift through it all for the important stuff like where you left your keys.

There are many reasons we forget things and often these reasons overlap. Like in the example above, some information never makes it to LTM. Other times, the information gets there, but is lost before it can attach itself to our LTM. Other reasons include decay, which means that information that is not used for an extended period of time decays or fades away over time. It is possible that we are physiologically preprogrammed to eventually erase data that no longer appears pertinent to us.

Failing to remember something doesn’t mean the information is gone forever though. Sometimes the information is there but for various reasons we can’t access it. This could be caused by distractions going on around us or possibly due to an error of association (e.g., believing something about the data which is not correct causing you to attempt to retrieve information that is not there). There is also the phenomenon of repression, which means that we purposefully (albeit subconsciously) push a memory out of reach because we do not want to remember the associated feelings. This is often sited in cases where adults ‘forget’ incidences of sexual abuse when they were children. And finally, amnesia, which can be psychological or physiological in origin.

Lecture 13

John Dewey

John Dewey is one of the giants in the history of educational theory, and it’s difficult to isolate one of his specific theories to discuss here. He was influential in so many areas of educational reform, that to choose one theme would do him a disservice, so I will highlight several of the areas in which he was ahead of his time.

The theory and how it can be applied to education

Even before the constructivist theories of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky were widely known, Dewey was talking about how children learn best when they interacted with their environments and were actively involved with the school curriculum. He rejected much of the prevalent theory of the time – behaviourism – as too simplistic and inadequate to explain complex learning processes. He argued that rather than the child being a passive recipient of knowledge, as was presumed by many educators of the time, children were better served if they took an active part in the process of their own learning. He also placed greater emphasis on the social context of learning. At the turn of the 20th Century, these were radical ideas.

Dewey further argued that for education to be at its most effective, children should be given learning opportunities that enabled them to link present content to previous experiences and knowledge. Again, this was a ground breaking idea for the period. Yet another feature in Dewey’s theories was the need for learners to engage directly with their environment, in what came to be known as experiential learning, where ‘knowledge comes from the impressions made upon us by natural objects.’ This approach led later to a number of other similar approaches such as problem-based learning and inquiry based learning.

Notwithstanding, Dewey was wary of placing too much emphasis on the child’s abilities, but preferred to place his trust in a more balanced approach to education where teacher, students and content were given equal importance in the learning equation. Ultimately, his belief was that teachers should not be in the classroom to act simply as instructors, but should adopt the role of facilitator and guide, giving students the opportunities to discover for themselves and to develop as active and independent learners. In some schools, a return to these values is long overdue.

Lecture 14

Jean Piaget was born on August 9, 1896 in Neuchatel, Switzerland and died September 17, 1980. He was an influential experimenter and theorist in the field of developmental psychology and in the study of human intelligence. His father was devoted to his writings of medieval literature and the history of Neuchatel. Piaget learned from his father the value of systematic work, even in small matters. His mother was very intelligent, energetic, and kind, but had a rather neurotic temperament that made family life troublesome. Her mental health influenced his studies of psychology and he became interested in psychoanalysis and pathological psychology. Piaget's godfather was the Swiss scholar Samuel Cornut who nurtured in him an interest in philosophy and epistemology during his adolescence.

Piaget grew up fast and had many interests. He became interested in mechanics, birds, fossils of secondary and tertiary layers, and seashells when he was seven. And, at an early age became an active scholar. He published his first paper at age ten and by the age of 22 he had received his Ph. D. in science from the University of Neuchatel. Then in the spring of 1919, Piaget grew restless and left for le Valais where he applied Lipps' Statistical method to a biometric study of the variability of land mollusks as a function of altitude. In the autumn of 1919, he took a train to Paris where he spent two years at the Sorbonne and attended courses in pathological psychology where he learned to interview mental patients. At this time Theodore Simon asked Piaget to work at Binet's laboratory in Paris. There, he worked on refining Burt's reasoning test. This is when Piaget started to investigate the way that children reason. For about two years he analyzed the verbal reasoning of normal children by presenting them with a variety of questions and exposing them to tasks that involved simple concrete relations of cause and effect. At last, Piaget knew what he wanted to study. He wanted to work in this field of inductive and experimental psychology.

He had problems publishing some of his works due to the fact that he was so young. Throughout his life, he had many offers and advanced quickly in everything that he did. In 1921, Piaget was invited by Claparede to become the director of research at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva. Here, he could work in the field of child psychology and guide students. He planned to study the emergence of intelligence for the first two years and then return to the origins of mental health. The results of his work were published in the first five books on child psychology. It was during this time that he met Valentine Chatenay, a student of the Institute. Later he married her and she became a constant co-worker. Piaget was asked by many countries to present and discuss his ideas in front of university faculties and other teachers. However, he felt there were two short-comings of his work, which limited his work to language and expressive thought and the lack of characteristic structure-of-the-whole relative to logical operations themselves. The thing that comforted him was the fact that he found Gestalt psychology and that his theory was not a folly, but a splendid series of experiments.

In 1925, Piaget, took the chair of philosophy at the University of Neuchatel. His duties where to teach psychology, philosophy, science, a philosophy seminar, and sociology. Also at this time, his first daughter was born. His second daughter was born in 1927 and a boy followed in 1931. With the birth of his children he started to spend considerable time, with the help of his wife, observing their reactions and subjecting them to various experiments. He looked at the genesis of intelligent conduct, ideas of objective constancy, and causality. He also noted symbolic behaviors such as imitation and play. The main benefit that he derived from these studies was that Piaget learned in the most direct way how intellectual operations are prepared by sensory-motor action, long before the appearance of language. With this knowledge he changed his method of study by modifying the direction of conversation to objects that the child could manipulate by themselves. He discovered that children up to the age of twelve did not believe in the constancy of material quantity, weight, and volume of a lump of modeling clay. He had also discovered from his own children that between the age of six to ten months, they did not possess the notion of constancy and permanency of an object disappearing from view. He felt that there had to be successive stages in the development of ideas of constancy which could be studied in concrete situations rather than solely through language.

In 1929, Piaget returned to the University of Geneva where he continued his research of child psychology on a larger scale. He also studied concrete operations and finally discovered the operative structure-of-the-whole that he had been seeking for so long. To do this he analyzed children four to eight years of age in the relationship of part and whole. Piaget took on many roles during his time at Geneva and during the war, he worked faster and harder for fear that he would never finish his work. This placed him in the position to write on genetic epistemology. Although his plan had been to spend five years studying children, it ended up taking him thirty years to complete his studies.

Piaget was originally trained in the areas of biology and philosophy. He considered himself a " genetic epistimologist" with his main interest being how one comes to know things. Piaget felt that the difference between humans and animals was the fact that humans are able to do reasoning through abstract symbolism. Piaget was interested in the thought processes that underlie reasoning and felt that younger children answered differently then their older peers due to the fact that the reasoned differently. From this, he observed children of various ages and development theProcess of Cognitive Development which has two major aspects: the coming to know and the stages that we move through to acquire this ability.

Piaget was an active man throughout his life. He enjoyed great fame and had many discoveries. He started out studying mollusk and then studied his own children as they developed. He worked at several universities in the departments of philosophy, child psychology, and history. Today his theory of cognitive development is used in many of the preschool and primary grade set-ups. Children in these programs are encouraged to learn through discovery. They are supported in all the things they try and challenged to try new things that are just beyond the child's ability but not to far out of their reach

Theory

To Piaget, there were several factors in a child's cognitive development. He felt that the most critical one was the interactions with a child's peers. These interactions lead to cognitive conflicts which turned into arguing and debating with their peers. This conflict requires the child to decenter themselves and look at the other person's point of view. He found that children are more free to confront ideas when working with peers compared to when they are talking to adults. Sometimes though, children find themselves working with children at the same level of development and do not argue so they do not make gains like they would when confronted with conflict.

After watching many children, he felt that all children went through a series of four stages in the same order. Some children advanced through a stage faster than other children. The first stage that he observed was from birth to two years of age. Piaget called this the sensorimotor period. Children in this stage have a cognitive system that is limited to the motor reflexes. Then start to build on these reflexes in order to develop more sophisticated procedures through physical interactions and experiences. By seven months, a child has learned about object permanency, the knowledge that an object still exists when not in the child's view. During this stage, the child develops simple activities to a wider range of situations and coordinates them into lengthy chains of behavior. A child in this stage is just starting to realize that they are in control of their movements and this allows them to develop new intellectual abilities. They start to learn what the appropriate actions are and they begin to work on the ability to communicate with others through sounds and words that are simple to say. Children at this stage learn from their parents and care- givers. They imitate what they see and hear and experiment with muscle movements and sounds that the mouth makes.

The next stage that Piaget developed starts at about age two and lasts until the child is about six or seven years old. This stage he called the Pre-Operational Period. During this stage, children start to use mental imagery and language. Children here are very egocentric. These children view things that are happening around them in only one point of view...their's. Piaget probably found that his own children at this age could not reason why their parents felt the way they did, but only reasoned from what the children knew. Children in this stage think in a non-logical and nonreversible pattern.

The third stage that Piaget outlined was the Concrete Operational Stage. This stage starts at age six or seven and last till the child is eleven or twelve years old. In this stage, Piaget found that children are capable of taking another person's point of view and incorporating more than one perspective simultaneously. At this stage the child can see and reason with concrete knowledge but is unable to look at the abstract side of things and develop all of the possible outcomes. Children in this stage can work out story problems that do not ask for the abstract but deal with facts alone. They also understand seven types of conservation: the conservation of number, liquid, length, mass, weight, area, and volume. Their thought pattern is now logical and systematic making it easier for them to find answers to simple problems.

The final stage is the Formal Operational Stage. This stage starts about eleven or twelve and goes all the way through adulthood. People in this stage are capable of thinking logically and abstractly as well as theoretically. They use symbols that are related to the abstract concepts to complete problems. To Piaget, this was the ultimate stage of development. He also believed that even though they were here, they still needed to revise their knowledge base. Children by this stage are self motivators. They learn from reading and trying out new ideas as well as from helping friends and adults. Piaget believed that not everyone reaches this stage of development.

Lecture 15

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