Learning outcomes

The intended outcomes of this activity are for you to:

Learn that:

• Learning involves a lasting change in pupils’ capabilities or understanding. - An important factor in learning is memory, which can be thought of as comprising two elements: working memory and long-term memory.
• Working memory is where information that is being actively processed is held, but its capacity is limited and can be overloaded.
• Long-term memory can be considered as a store of knowledge that changes as pupils learn by integrating new ideas with existing knowledge.
• In all subject areas, pupils learn new ideas by linking those ideas to existing knowledge, organising this knowledge into increasingly complex mental models (or “schemata”); carefully sequencing teaching to facilitate this process is important.

In your notepad

Keep a note of your responses to the following questions and bring them with you to your first mentor session for this module to inform your discussions:

• what do you understand as the difference between long-term memory and working memory?

• what happens when the working memory becomes overloaded?

• how might this affect learning in the classroom?

• what are some of the techniques which you read about which a teacher can use to ensure that pupils don’t become overloaded?