Brain Research

I’m sure many of you will think I’m a nerd, but I have spent this week reading up on the human brain. Although I have learned tons of interesting information, I thought I would share just a little of it with you about chunking. Many times we refer to chunks while we teach. For example, in accuracy we work on breaking words into chunks or in comprehension we have students break what they are reading into chunks. Although this technique is common, we don’t always apply it to our teaching of content. There is now a higher value on teaching content in even smaller chunks than ever before. The science showing that students can hold seven chunks in their working memory is outdated. Research now shows that two to four chunks is more realistic. The learners you are working with, and their background knowledge, can help us to determine the maximum load of the hippocampus. Too much content means the brain cannot process, and in the end we simply don’t learn.

Here are the basic guidelines:

·        Four to eight minutes of content when you are teaching items which students have less background knowledge and the complexity is greater.

·        Eight to fifteen minutes of content when teaching items in which the students have greater background knowledge and less complexity.

·        Longer than fifteen minutes of content is proven to be ineffective.

You may need to process this in chunks;)