Week 2 - Chunking

Like riding a bike
I'm just getting around to posting about week 2 of the course and will post over the next few days updating this blog as I go along.

This week was all about 'Chunking', a process of using the 'working memory' to learn, and over time, with practice creating a chunk of information learnt. The best way I can describe this is when learning to ride a bike;

You start off learning without any previous experience, you learn various aspects as you go through the practice of riding. these separate elements, or memory traces of learning, the balance, the peddling, the braking and so on, are being wrestled with in your working memory, the focused mode, and with practice become 'Chunked' together, they form a larger chain of neurological skills that are intrinsically linked together. With spaced repetition they become stronger and even link to previous skills you may have already gained, such as breaking when you were being pushed on your toy go-cart. This happens when you go into the diffuse mode, as you may remember when learning anything like riding a bike, sometimes it doesn't seem to get any better, but then you have a break from it, even a good nights sleep, and hey presto, it seems to go better the next day. This collaboration between the focused and diffuse modes are critical in gaining the long term learning. Eventually you get so good at riding you bike you don't even seem to have to think about it any more, it has moved into the storage warehouse of your long term memory, that you can easily access. It's just like, ehumm, riding a bike.


Unknown artist's wonderful diagram of how to ride a bike

With the incredible advances in Neuro science, more is being reviled to us all the time as teams of talented and committed people work on particular aspects of the brain and it's function. Drawing relationships between their findings and what we experience/see etc. are always of interest to me, particularly when it comes to learning and learning difficulties.

It was also clear within this weeks lectures and discussions that some things are not conducive to good learning, such as;

• Stress
• Hunger
• Distractions
• Procrastination
• Ill health

The two underlined in the above list I added myself and were not in the course video, but from experience of working with people who have difficulties in learning they should be there, and the list could go on. I thought about these things in my learning, particularly when I was at school and how the environment and culture of my secondary schooling was not good. Schools and colleges these days are better at understanding how children best learn but still have a long way to go to give everyone, despite their learning aptitude, disability, upbringing and cultural/religious beliefs, a fair chance to enjoy and benefit from learning.

It works
I was at a meeting on Tuesday with managers who support people with learning difficulties. In my role, I was leading the meeting and things were going well. Then it happened, someone asked me about learning, more specifically about how we learn.

Well I was off, with surprising confidence it went a bit like this;

• I started by drawing a picture of the brain on the white board and indicated the prefrontal cortex, the working memory
• I then indicated the rest of the brain and described the long term memory, the warehouse.
• I was rolling now, and drew in the slots of the working memory citing a paper I had read discussing the size and nature of this memory
• I was getting short of time but pushed on, using the analogy I wrote above, I explained how things moved from the working memory, Chunked and related to other things you have learnt. I gave some examples of my childhood antics that required similar skills which they enjoyed, maybe at my expense.
• The best bit for me was when I got onto relating this to the people we support who have a learning difficulty. It fitted so well that all the things that stop us from learning apply to them equally, despite damage and access problems to parts of their brains. We talked about stress, Distractions, setting up the engagement oppertunity so that they would be successful (making tea was my example and giving just the right support so that they could do as much as they can and still end up with a nice cuppa).
• We went on to talk about repetition and rewards. It was fantastic, it all fitted together and the group really responded to my enthusiasm with actions to do back at the homes they manage.
• We went a bit over time but it was fine, they all fed back in a 'round' at the end with positive comments about the meeting and are looking forward to the next.

For me, I was amazed at how much had gone in, how I felt comfortable with their questions on learning and it's flow. The only shame is that I didn't take a picture of my scribblings so I could post it here, but I know it will happen again.

I am intrigued by the idea that we only have 4 slots in our working memory and why 'Chunking' works. On my journey through various articles and papers on this I came across this one: 

When four is not four, but rather two plus two

MIT neuroscientists redefine the limits of visual working memory.
They discuss that not only may we have around 4 working memory slots but also that they are linked to the two hemispheres of our brains, two on the left and two on the right. A quote from this article by Emily Finn, MIT News Office 
June 23, 2011,
'The researchers tracked visual information as it flowed from the parietal cortex, where sensory input is initially processed, to the frontal cortex, where higher-order structures encode it for memory. “We found that the bottleneck is not in the remembering, it is in the perceiving,” Miller says. Essentially, working memory for more than two objects in the same visual field was doomed from step one.'

There seems to be more that needs to be investigated here and particularly in 'what is being processed', what I mean by this is that this study is based around a shape with a colour in it, what if it is a picture of something familiar and unfamiliar, would this still be the case? In terms of learning, and particularly in relation to 'Chunking' it would be good to give ourselves and those we maybe teaching the best opportunities to take things in, so we could consider this study as an opportunity to improve how we pass information to others.

When I put 'Chunking' into Google I came across this web site: http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/chunking-method-definition-examples-quiz.html where Chris Clause gives some clear everyday examples of the process and also a quiz to try. It reminded me that we 'Chunk' all the time and got me to thinking about how they use it within advertising. I've been playing 'Spot the Chunk' when seeing or hearing an advertisement, and found this has really helped with my understanding and recognition of Chunking, (as well as being very irritating to my wife).