A Cognitive Model for Educators: Attention, Encoding, Storage, Retrieval

So how do people learn? What are the mechanics of memory? Can we distill thousands of articles and books to something that is manageable, digestible, and applicable to our classrooms? Yes. In brief, the cognitive process of learning has four basic stages:

Attention: the filter through which we experience the world Encoding: how we process what our attention admits into the mind Storage: what happens once information enters the brain Retrieval: the recall of that information or behavior

Almost everything we do or know, we learn through these stages, for our learning is memory, and the bulk of our memory is influenced by these four processes: what we pay attention to, how we encode it, what happens to it in storage, and when and how we retrieve it. Heres a closer look at each: Attention: We are bombarded by sensory information, but we attend to only a small amount of it. We constantly process sights, sounds, smells, and more, but our attention selects only a small fraction of it for conscious thought. Take a moment wherever you are right now and listen silently. What sounds do you hear? The whirring of air conditioning? The murmur of

voices nearby? Or perhaps traffic--cars or people? Or a light breeze through trees? Or a ticking clock? Chances are some of these sounds are nearly always present where you are, but our attention attenuates them, it filters them out, and it amplifies, instead, what is important to us. The pieces of information we amplify--like the sounds we just paid attention to: the traffic, the voices, etc--they are what reach our brains and what eventually sit in our memory. In this way, attention is a process of selection; it is the gateway to what we think about and remember. In short: what we pay attention to is what we learn. Encoding: Once information passes through the gateway of attention, we encode it with other information we already know, either writing new experiences into our mind or attaching new experience to old. Consider again the sounds we heard a moment ago. First, we noticed them. Then, we identified them--but only because we could attach them to prior knowledge. Weve heard air conditioning before. We know what traffic sounds like, or the murmur of people. Because we had this prior knowledge, we could understand and attach the new sounds to something we already know--thereby developing new knowledge. Imagine you had never seen or heard of a fan. How would you understand the whooshing, whirring sound coming from the ceiling vent or window? Or, if you had never seen a car on a road, how could you explain the sounds of traffic? Because we can contextualize these sounds through our prior knowledge, we can remember and understand them. This is how encoding works: it attaches new information to old information. Storage: Once weve encoded information, though, it has something of a life cycle of its own inside the brain. This is storage. Assuming we never think about the new information again, the brain undergoes a kind of triage, rehearsing some information on its own, but forgetting most. The consolidation and rehearsal of selected important information in the brain happens primarily, it appears, during sleep, but the forgetting of everything else happens almost immediately. We'll look into this further later on. For now, consider the sounds again. If you never actively think of them again, they will fade over time in your memory. But, if they left a strong impression on you--if you had a strong response (of interest! of shock!)-then the memory of the sounds will last longer and with more detail than if you cared little for them. In this way, the duration of the memory in storage depends on the strength of the encoding--and on some elements of sleep. Again, more on all this in coming posts. Retrieval: Last is retrieval. (But, sneakily, it is also first...!) When we pull something something to mind, we access memories weve created before. This retrieval of past memories is both the end and the beginning of the learning cycle, for retrieving something from memory brings it

back into attention, re-encoding it, and starting the cycle of learning again. In this way, each time you recall the sound of the air, of the traffic, or of the people near you, you encode the experience again, strengthening it, and reinforcing the memory in your brain. While reading this page, you have encoded the sounds of where you are at least a handful of times. And the more you repeat the process, making it more a part of your prior knowledge, the more likely you will recognize it and direct attention to it at future exposures, retrieving and then re-encoding the memory. In this way, retrieval is both the end of the cognitive process of learning, and the beginning! And so, these four processes--attention, encoding, storage, and retrieval-undergird the learning that happens in all of our schools and classrooms, and the degree to which we understand them (scientifically or intuitively) influences the degree to which we can create the most effective learning environments. It influences the experiences we create for our students, and it influences how we understand their cognitive behavior in class. This becomes a real and useful, practical tool. And it raises all kinds of questions:

How do I compel, direct, or invite my students' attention? What do I do to encode information most richly? How can I promote effective storage? What kind of retrieval opportunities do I provide to most aid retention and transfer?

And more broadly:

How do these functions work? How can I engage them on a daily our courselong basis?

The next handful of posts will delve into each of these questions. We'll explore the four processes and the factors that influence them, and we'll examine the implications and opportunities they have for our work. And so until then, keep an ear to those sounds surrounding you, and see if you notice changes in what you attend to and how you encode them!

Attention: the "Holy Grail" of Learning

What is attention, and how does it work? Consider the satellite dish: The signal from every satellite TV channel beams through the air at every moment. And satellite dishes receive every frequency beamed from space, but they amplify only the channel or station we set them to. Millions of hours of airtime beam through space--but the great wealth of

it is tuned out. We only ever see or hear what the satellite dish is tuned to, what it attends to. So it is with our brains and attention. We are bombarded by sensory information--lights, sounds, sights, smells, balance, and more--but we direct our attention only to certain things, only to certain stimuli: the text we see in front of us, the music we are listening to. Our attention works in this way like a filter. We focus on what we like, and filter out what we do not seek. Like a satellite dish, the brain receives a flood of signal, but it amplifies only what we are compelled by, and it suppresses or ignores everything else. In this way, attention is where learning begins. Without our students attention, everything else is lost. And so our goals as educators begin with capturing, directing, or inviting student attention in the most productive ways. Yet, of the four cognitive processes that make up learning, attention proves to be the most complex and wide-ranging, the toughest to pin down. We talk about it in a number of different ways. Here is just a sampling: Scientists, researchers, and non-cognitive skills The last few years have seen a movement towards the discussion of non cognitive skills. But what these really get at are ways into attention: Motivation is really about the voluntary direction of attention. When we are motivated to do something, we pursue it more often; we give it more attention. Similarly, Carol Dwecks research on mindsets--whether we believe our intelligence is fixed, or whether we think intelligence is malleable--her research really explores whether we sustain our attention in the face of adversity. If we have a growth mindset, we believe that our work improves with effort, and so we direct our attention to it repeatedly. Roy Baumeisters research on willpower explores the factors that influence whether we sustain attention. Our attention and resolve are limited, but we can exercise and adjust the factors that marshall our limited attention. And out of Stanford, Clifford Nass research on multitasking (and our inability to do it) further informs how we channel, and lose, attention.

In all these--motivation, mindsets, willpower, and multi-tasking--we find we are really talking about attention, and that exploring these non cognitive skills is really another way to understand how and why people direct their attention--or not.

Writers, Advertisers, too... But we can understand attention in other ways, too. In advertising, business, and elsewhere, writers exploring other issues are really exploring attention: Chip and Dan Heaths book Made to Stick captures much of what we know about attention, and how to capture it from the outside. It explores the stickiness of objects, and why they keep popping into mind. Microstyle, by advertising man Christopher Johnson, explores how to capture attention through language. And specifically by using small amounts of it very carefully with deliberate intention. And Samuel Johnson again, reminds us of the power of pleasure:

What is read with delight is commonly retained, because pleasure always secures attention; but the books which are consulted by occasional necessity, and perused with impatience, seldom leave any traces on the mind. (Idler #74, September 15, 1759) Each of these many sources addresses factors that invite, compel, or otherwise influence attention, and the great variety of sources reflect the great variety of ways that attention works. But when it comes to it, what are the mechanics of attention? How does attention work? Mechanics of Attention Research from the last fifteen years suggests that we have two main kinds of attention: goal-directed attention and stimulus-driven attention.

The first, goal-directed attention, describes something like focus, the practice of directing ourselves towards activities or thoughts. It describes attention through motivation, willpower, curiosity, and many other self-driven forces. It is sustained by our intent, and it is influenced by many, many factors that threaten to interrupt or supersede it. The second, stimulus-driven attention, describes our awareness of and response to the sensory stimuli that surround us. It describes our unconscious monitoring of our sensory landscape and the promotion of certain things to our attention, overriding our goal-oriented attention, if necessary--like a circuit breaker interrupting current when something big comes along! We know, for example, that stimulus-driven attention is captured by high-contrast changes in our environment (stillness to movement, loud to soft, dark to bright, etc.) and by high-intensity stimulation (extreme sounds, sights, etc.). And so we can fill in some detail in our satellite dish metaphor: imagine those long-distance microphones we sometimes see at sporting events. Like our attention, we focus them on specific targets to capture sounds from a particular direction. We choose to point them at something of interest. This is like goal-directed attention. But, if a loud enough noise comes from another direction, if a strong enough signal comes from elsewhere, it will override what were focusing on, and pull us towards the new sound. This is like stimulus-driven attention. Were driven by the intensity of the new sound to pay to attention to it. Both of these kinds of attention operate at the same time, and our ability to regulate them--to moderate between the two, to stay focused on our goal-directed attention and to limit the influence of our stimulus-driven attention--this is what shapes our learning most.

And this is what the writers, researchers and scientists above are all getting at. Willpower is about sustaining goal-oriented attention in the face of other stimuli. Motivation, too, is about making goal-oriented attention as strong as possible. The language work by Christopher Johnson in Microstyle aims to craft words and phrases that effectively capture stimulus-driven attention. So to with Made to Stick. And so how do we use this as teachers? Attention and Teaching style In the classroom, we have a range of teaching styles, and its important to preserve that. Its important first and foremost because kids have amazing radars for when were being inauthentic as teachers. And thats when they stop paying attention. And so how do we engage, invite, and compel student attention?

Our approaches are wide-ranging:

Recall those teachers you had, or knew about, whose seriousness, whose gravitas, you couldnt refuse. You simply didnt want to let them down because they took you so seriously, more seriously than you took yourself. They channeled your attention through their expectation of rigor. And recall as well the fun and charismatic teacher whose classroom environment was loose and easy, but who directed that energetic feel towards material that she was passionate about and intrigued by. She captured your attention because class was fun.

But so did the barbed drill sergeant of a teacher who inspired fear in you. She, too, channeled attention, if through a perceived threat. Nonetheless, you may still recall those lines you had to memorize in that class. And sometimes it was simply the way the teacher decorated the classroom. The space you were in - engaged or directed your attention because of the books on the bookshelves, or the simplicity or the space, or the table that everyone sat around.

Some of these might have summoned goal-directed attention in you. Others might have created environments where you were stimulusdriven, driven by external pressures. Summary And the lesson here is that the science, economy, and understanding of attention collectively suggest that attention is accessed by two routes, and that those routes are influenced by many factors. The more we know about these factors, the more we can engage the routes to our students hearts, the more we can tweak what we do as teachers and curriculum designers to better keep our students engaged. And how we engage our students must differ for each of us, for our different teaching styles, which derive from our different personalities, appropriately attract us to different classroom approaches. Some of us are drill sergeants, some charismatic hosts, some serious ushers of knowledge--and some of us are none of these, but other characters instead. And some of these personalities work in some classrooms and not others, for our students, too, need different kinds of teaching. We cannot write an algorithm for attention, because teaching is a social act. What matters is that it behooves us all to understand how attention works, so that we might best inform the moves we make in the classroom with an understanding of how those moves capture, direct, or simply invite our students attention--for that is the gateway to their learning. But opening this gateway is only the first step. Encoding the information that passes through attention is what makes education meaningful. This we explore in the next post.

Encoding: How to Make Memories Stick

Encoding is what happens when information meets the brain.

During exposure to new information, the brain does two things: first, it processes sensory and emotional information, and then second, it tries to attach this new information to old information, to prior knowledge. And the richer the sensori-emotional experience and the deeper the well of prior knowledge, the more strongly the new information is encoded into memory. And so, strong learning grows out of two things: full, multi-sensory experiences and/or richly contextualized information. Let's look a little closer...

Multi-Sensory Experience Several years ago, the science department where I teach switched to a Physics First curriculum. Like most schools, we had previously taught biology in the freshman year. But, one teacher told me, at a department meeting one day, the science teachers asked themselves: What is it that led us to become science teachers? What turned us on to science to begin with? And their answer to that question was that they remembered observing physical phenomena, getting their hands on things and playing with them. This physical experience with objects, their experience asking questions and experimenting with visible, tangible stuff, was what first developed their scientific thinking. It was what hooked them on science. And so as a result, the science department inverted the 9th and 11th grade years. They now teach physics first and a more advanced biology class to juniors. Now, the freshman year is largely spent handling and experimenting with directly observable physical materials. Students develop primary sensory experience with physical and scientific principles. And subsequent to this move, weve seen a jump in students taking advanced science courses in later years. This seems the fulfillment of philosophies that have been around for ages:

Dewey and Aristotle both promote experiencing information in the most direct, authentic, multi-sensory way. And we can unpack Deweys phrase impress the mind to understand that the more we see, touch, feel, and experience what we seek to learn, the better we learn it, the more we impress it into our memory. Weve known about this for some time, and this is what immersive, experiential education is all about. Its why we create, easily recall, and enjoy multi-sensory experiences. And so, the richer the sensory-emotional experience of new information is, the more deeply it is encoded into the brain. Prior Knowledge And the added benefit of these kinds of primary experiences is that they fuel our learning later on. When we have vivid and strong prior knowledge about a subject, we have access and insight into new related, knowledge. When we have previous experience with something, we can encode new information more effectively and more richly.

The sentence above makes little sense on a first read. Notes and seams? Whats going on here? But, when supplied with a little bit of prior knowledge (for example, that the sentence describes a damaged bagpipe), we are suddenly able put the sentence into a context. We can associate

the words with prior knowledge we have. We have a hanger upon which to drape new information. And this is the second form of encoding: attaching new information to old information, to prior knowledge. In a recent conversation, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John McPhee spoke about the relationship between our previous experiences--our prior knowledge--and our present interests. He said it like this:

He describes here how attention works like a filter, and he proposes that we attend to what we already know, that we attend to what we have previous interest in and experience with. And if the first key takeaway about encoding is that multi-sensory experiences are encoded more richly into the brain, then the second key takeaway about encoding is that we attach new experiences to prior experiences, to prior knowledge. And the more prior knowledge we have, the more hangers we have to drape our new knowledge on, the more richly we can encode and associate new information. McPhee here is onto the close relationship between attention and encoding, that what we attend to feeds what we know, and what we know feeds what we attend to. Summary Educators often talk about teaching to multiple sensory pathways, and it is absolutely accurate to say that providing a variety of sensory and emotional experiences with content enables students to learn better. Indeed, students encode information in more ways when they see, touch, move, and hear information. But equally as important is how richly that information is contextualized. When students have prior experience with a subject,

they have a context within which they can understand the new information. The value of this cannot be overstated.

(Interlude) Long Term Memory and Working Memory

Before we dig further into memory, we need a brief interlude. Let's take a step back and consider the whole system of thinking and memory for a moment. Here's something to begin: Stored in the corners of our minds is the image of a ball soaring through the air. Let it be a baseball, basketball, football, or ball of your choice. It makes a great arc in the air, and we can picture it rising and falling. Until I mentioned it, we werent consciously thinking of it, but the image was there, planted from previous experiences in our lives, tucked away in what we call Long Term Memory. When, in a conversation, someone starts talking about parabolas, we might initially hesitate, unsure of what a parabola is, but when she says that a parabola is an arc made by an object thrown in the air, we suddenly recall the image of the soaring ball. We dig it out of Long Term Memory, and we bring it to mind, to a place we call Working Memory, the place where we hold information we are thinking about at a given time. This place, working memory, is occupied by a mix of thoughts prompted

by both our environments (in this case: the conversation about parabolas) and our long term memory (the flying ball). This exchange between our long term memories and our environments is where learning happens. It is where encoding happens, where new information from an experience interacts with old information from long term memory, where the term parabola is attached to the image of a ball arcing through the air. And this is a fruitful moment to introduce a diagram:

Our classrooms and the actions we make in them are the learning environments of our students (in green). And what our students fix their attention on determines what from the environment moves into working memory. In a stimulating classroom, working memory is engaged in a constant feedback loop between the student and the environment; students ask questions and manipulate content, focusing attention in new ways and bringing in new information. When this new information triggers recall of old information, it summons the old information from long term memory (on the left), and the new and old information are encoded together. The more the learning experience engages long term memory, and mixes new information with it, the more richly all the information is encoded together. In this way, we want our students to have constant exchange between their learning environment, working memory, and long term memory. They should revisit and recycle information, strengthening it, associating it, and contextualizing it.

I include this diagram at this point in the introduction to cognitive science because it provides a timely contextualization of some of the processes weve looked at so far (attention and encoding) with some of the processes well be looking at shortly (storage and retrieval). This separates the four stages of cognitive learning into two halves that roughly divide the learning process into two chunks: how stuff goes into the brain (attention and encoding), and what stuff comes out (storage and retrieval). Up next: what happens to memories once theyre in our minds? How does memory work? What does it look like?!

Information without anchors--information that is abstract and incomprehensible, or information that has no connection to what we already know--it passes through us, like the little white boxes with question marks above, sinking off the page and out of sight. Information with anchors--richly encoded one way or another--that is what we learn and remember. But what happens after information is encoded into the brain? What is the half-life of knowledge? What makes memory last? These questions well explore in coming posts.

Storage I: How Memory Works

And this brings us to storage... to memory. What is memory and how does it work?

Here is the current thinking: Memory is not the placement of something in the mind, like a book on a shelf, but instead it is the establishment of neural connections, of something like footpaths through the brain. Thoughts and experiences build connections between the billions and billions of neurons in the brain, establishing new networks and patterns of connections. These are what we understand to be thoughts and memories. And heres one way to picture this.

Imagine a stretch of sand, like a gradually sloping desert. But it rains on this desert, and when it rains, water from higher ground runs across the desert sand. This movement of water is the act of thinking. Water moves across the desert like signals moving through the brain, and memories are the tracks left in the sand, the channels and rivulets across the vast space. Every new idea or experience is a new source of water somewhere--sometimes a small trickle, sometimes a great cascade--and each new thought runs across the desert to lower ground, spreading out and criss-crossing previous memories, or funneling into a channel. This works in interesting ways as a metaphor.

(The associative mind)

In the highly associative mind, above, water spreads out and leaves many, ranging tracks across the sand, and every new thought, springing from different locations, criss-crosses the trails left behind by others. Thoughts and memories are connected, and opportunities for remixes, juxtaposition, and new understanding are many. The desert takes on many, multi-varied patterns.

(The habituated mind)

In the highly habituated mind, deep channels run through the sand, and new ideas or experiences funnel into these channels. Water that doesnt reach these channels pools up or evaporates, never quite making it across the desert. In this mind, most thoughts and experiences run quickly and surely to their destination, and new and surprising associations are fewer.

This works nicely as a metaphor for how the mind works--intersecting webs of waterways in the desert are like the neural networks that make up our thought processes and memories in the cortex. Now, imagine those vast and intricate pathways on the desert floor wrapping around

into a three dimensional, brain-shaped space. In this space, the passing of the water across the surface of the desert is like the passing of our thoughts through the brain. They come and go, springing from a source, from stimulation. The rivulets we see carved into the sand are like memories, neural routes that are established through the mind. They wash or fade away without use, or they are made stronger by repeated prompting, and from that repetition we develop neural habits of thought. If, after a long period of time, some rivulets or pathways have been worn away, then a new source of water might run across the empty space, filling in--or carving out--what has eroded. And there two key takeaways from this metaphor: The first is that association strengthens memory. The number of connections built in the brain influences the number of times memories (or paths over the sand) are revisited, which influences the duration of the memory. Intersecting waterways suggest more water will pass over a particular place. Associated thoughts work similarly. When we associate information, we retain it longer, because we recall it--we retrieve it--more often. (Its important to note that the organization of the associations is really important. More on this in two posts, when we get to retrieval.) For this reason, connecting what we share in the classroom to current events, to personal memories, to other contextual information, or even to simple mnemonics all help strengthen memory. How we encode information influences its durability and flexibility in our minds. Similarly, intensity of encoding influences memory. The strength of the original stimulation influences what is stored and for how long. A strong gush of water will carve a deep crevasse in the sand, and it will take a long time to wear away. If new information is attached to intense sound, sight, or feeling (such as the profound pleasure of intellectual discovery!), then the memory is encoded more richly, and lasts longer. Recall the great pride in the first A from that really difficult teacher. It was a moment of intense pleasure. Similarly, remember the extremely loud noise that once startled you. It was less pleasurable, but you still havent forgotten it.

But what happens to that memory once it is forged? How long does it last? What affects it while its hibernating? These well explore next!

Storage II: Sleep and Memory

What happens to memories once we make them? Where do they live? Why do they last? More technically: what mechanisms enable us to move memories from working memory into long term memory? And, what does sleep have to do with all this? Some biology will help us out here. Lets look for a moment at two important regions of the brain: the cortex, which is the big labyrinthine web of cauliflower in the picture below, and the hippocampus, a much smaller region of the brain deeper into the center of our heads.

The cortex plays a large role in conscious thought and in the processing of information in working memory. The hippocampus, however, plays an essential role in the formation of long-term memory, the translation of information from working memory to long-term memory. In fact, without the hippocampus, we wouldn't be able to make any new long-term memories at all. (Kind of like the movie "Memento." Also, theres a really interesting true story about a man whose hippocampus was removed, and he was thereafter unable to create any new long-term memories. If youre interested in this, google HM psychology.) And so heres the interesting part about the hippocampus, the cortex, and memory: Were discovering more and more that sleep plays a significant role in consolidating memory. An enormous amount of activity happens in

these regions during sleep, and its been shown to have a significant impact on what happens to our memories in our brains. Its a really exciting area of study right now, and what follows is only a brief entry into the science of sleep. Sleep You may know that we experience sleep in 90-120 minute cycles. Over the course of a nights sleep, our brains show different patterns of movement, and these patterns occur in fairly predictable cycles. During some cycles our brains move very quickly, showing tremendous activity. During others, they move very slowly. And during these 90-120 minute cycles over the course of a night, the brain performs different tasks: During hours 1-2, the first hours of sleep, memories are consolidated in the hippocampus, that interior region of the brain, and they are prepared for long-term storage. During hours 2-6, memories are "moved" to the cortex, where they are kept for long-term memory. And this means that, on average, if you are getting less than six hours of sleep, then you are not securing that information in long-term memory as well as possible. But hours 6-9 are when the magic happens: and this is when it gets really cool. During these hours, the brain actively rehearses memories, replaying them in the cortex during REM sleep. Some studies have shown that sleeping those extra 2-3 hours can even improve memory performance by up to 25%. I enjoy telling this to my students: look, without studying any more, you can do better, simply by sleeping! Your brain actively rehearses what youve been working on. (...of course you have to have understood and studied the material to begin with...) And, interestingly, its not only memory--but also insight and attention. They all improve with sleep, which really is a topic all its own.

Summary of Storage

And so, storage (memory) has two parts. We have seen in previous posts that storage is influenced by the intensity and diversity of encoding, and we see here that sleep enhances our storage.

And so, memories are made and strengthened by association, intensity, and repetition. And they are consolidated and rehearsed during sleep. This means that as educators, it's helpful to build rich, associative experiences for our students so that their learning is part of an organized network that lasts. And, the more opportunities we can provide for students to revisit information and then sleep on it, the more opportunities we give them to turn it over in their heads. Some researchers refer to this practice as "spacing"; if we return to material on separate days--if we leave space between our interactions with it--then we allow students to process what they learn, and this helps maximize their learning. We'll pick up on this in the next post, on retrieval, the last of the four essential cognitive practices. Coming up next: How does retrieval influence memory? And what can we do to maximize the ease and efficiency of retrieval?

Retrieval: Getting and Forgetting

What saves our sanity, every day, is that we can forget. Its good that we forget things--even though sometimes we forget more than we want to-for if we never forgot anything we ever thought or saw, wed drown in the information overload. For teachers, all this forgetting means that even if we sustain our students attention, even if we help our students encode information richly, and even if we create opportunities for students to consolidate that information in their minds--they will still naturally forget things. Like patterns in sand on the beach that wash away, so will memories. And it turns out that the rate at which we forget things has been studied. Forgetting and Remembering In the late 1800s, a psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus tested peoples memories for both meaningless and meaningful information over time, and he developed curves that showed our rate of forgetting information. (Ebbinghaus is that guy pictured above...)

We lose information really fast! This graph shows the rate of retention for nonsense information; within an hour, more than half is gone. Within 24 hours: two-thirds. Meaningful information sticks around longer, as we'll see in a moment, but memory still degrades. It turns out, though, that we can help information live longer in our brains by bringing it back to mind--by retrieving it. If we do this, the curve of our forgetting changes, and our expectation for long term memory can increase.

Imagine you learn something so that you can repeat it from memory. As we saw above, your memory of it will naturally deteriorate over time. The curve above shows what happens if we learn it fully again, one day later. We can see here that after studying it a second time, the curve flattens out at a higher level. This represents how, over time, we retain a greater amount of the information as a result of the second learning. And, if we repeat the process of learning again--if we study the material a third time--then the curve shifts again, and our long term retention includes an even greater percentage of the content. See here:

And so, the more times we review and relearn the information, the more of it we retain over time. How many repetitions are best? In addition to measuring how much information we lose from memory after periods of time, Ebbinghaus also measured how many times he had to repeat something in order to fully commit it to memory. To test this, Ebbinghaus practiced memorizing meaningless information (sequences of nonsense syllables), and meaningful information (eight lines of a poem by Byron). He would read and recite the material again and again until he could repeat it all, entirely from memory. At this first go around, he counted how many times he had to repeat the information before he could recite it perfectly from memory. By the next day, he would have forgotten much of what he had studied. So, that next day, he would try again with the same information--and he would again measure how many times he had to repeat/rehearse/practice the information before he could do so without prompting. And then, a day later, again. And each day took fewer and fewer tries:

Each line above is a different body of information, and the vertical axis shows how many times Ebbinghaus had to repeat the information in order to commit it to memory. The largest amount of nonsense information naturally takes the longest. Notice how the poem from Byron takes the fewest repetitions, even at the outset--and even though eight lines of poetry is far more content than even the largest amount of nonsense information. This is because he can encode the information from the Byron poem more richly and easily; it has meaning, and he can attach the words and images in the poetry to stories and imagery in his mind, to prior knowledge that he has. By day five, in fact, he needed no prompting at all, having fully committed the verse to memory. Now remember the previous posts about how memory works: retrieval is the stage of learning when we reach into our long-term memory to pull thoughts back into consciousness, back into working memory. Knowing what we now know about the brain, we can see that when we recall information, we send signals through the networks of neurons weve formed, through the pathways that have been forged throughout the brain. Remember the desert image; we run water across the sand, and it travels across paths and rivulets it had previously carved, both revisiting (remembering!) them and deepening them, making them easier to access the next time. This is retrieval.

~ And so, work by Ebbinghaus and others offer us three specific takeaways about retrieval: First: retrieval strengthens memory. This is the lesson from Ebbinghaus: the more we bring something to mind, the stronger it becomes in our memory. The simple act of thinking changes our minds. And as an understanding of encoding shows us, this is particularly true if we retrieve memories in order to connect them to something new. Simply bringing something to mind strengthens its impression, and associating that memory with something new strengthens it even further. For this reason, it's helpful to do something with memories or pieces of information when we retrieve them: rearrange or reorganize them, write about them, talk about them with somebody, etc. Remember the diagram about working memory and long term memory. Retrieval pulls information out of long-term memory, cycling it into working memory and re-encoding it with any new, additional information. We are elaboratively building associations, forming new networks of knowledge and thought. Second, the organization of encoding influences retrieval . If your brain were a bookshelf, and youre trying to find a book, then if the books were stacked all willy-nilly, it may take some rummaging around to find what youre looking for. But, if youve organized the books on your shelves, then the one book will be much easier to find. For instance, if you choose to organize your shelf by the length of the title, with oneword titles on the left, then retrieving your book of choice will be much easier. So it is with cognitive retrieval. If youve associated memories with similar memories by making connections between them, then theyll be easy to find. If memories have been stored in isolation, or were not stored deliberately at all, then they may be hiding off in a dusty, shady corner somewhere. The third takeaway, though less discussed here, is: our environment influences our retrieval. Stress and emotion can stifle our ability to easily recall what we know. Calm and space can promote effective retrieval. Weve all experienced this: when under time pressure, that elusive fact or idea can seem tantalizingly far from reach, but when were performing some routine task later on, that elusive fact we were looking for pops into mind. In this way and others, the various pressures and expectations of our environments can influence our retrieval in numerous ways. Much is written about this, and if its a top ic of particular interest, the book Choke by Sian Beilock, offers a great overview.

Overview As teachers, then, we can craft our student experiences in ways that amplify the benefits of retrieval so that the habits, skills, and information we promote in classes can more readily transfer into their lives. In our planning, we want to offer regular retrieval opportunities for our students to strengthen their memories, we want to ensure that we promote organized encoding so that students can access their learning more readily, and we want to be sure that we create a safe and nonthreatening environment in our classroom spaces to facilitate both their encoding and retrieval.

This is the fourth stage of the cognitive model for educators: attention, encoding, storage, and retrieval. In the remaining posts well look at the implications and opportunities that arise from this framework, starting in the next post with how this framework directly informs our day-to-day planning and teaching.

Cognitive Design: Essential Questions for Educators

On its own, cognitive science is helpful for understanding how the mind works; it's only useful, though, if we can apply this understanding to facilitate better learning. So how is the cognitive model for learning useful for educators? Lets review: learning happens in four cognitive stages: Attention, Encoding, Storage (I and II), and Retrieval. And from the perspective of students, we can think of these stages working like this:

Attention is the filtering out of the many stimuli of the world and the focusing on the information at hand. Encoding is the brain registering this information, processing sensory experience and attaching new information to old information. Storage is the consolidation of information and its movement from working memory to long term memory.

Retrieval is the act of bringing long-term memory back into mind, back in to working memory and out into our experiences, silently to ourselves or publicly to others.

As educators, we can deliberately consider these processes in our work; these processes can directly inform how we plan individual classes, how we plan a unit, or even a year. And even if we are not teachers, but people engaged more broadly in the education space (ed tech ed techdesigners, administrators, and more), we can ask: Attention:

Am I aware of what my students, clients, or users attend to? How am I capturing, directing, engaging, or simply inviting their attention? Have I created a safe environment in which students attention is on the learning?

Encoding:

How can I richly encode new learning by making it as multi-sensory as possible? How can I attach what I am teaching to what they know? (What prior knowledge do my students or users have? Does their prior knowledge need correcting?) How can I connect new knowledge to old knowledge in the most organized way in order to enable easy retrieval later on?

Storage:

Have I given the brain ample time to consolidate and integrate memories? (Have I spread learning experiences over multiple nights/weeks/more to allow consolidation and integration during sleep?)

Retrieval:

How can I provide regular retrieval opportunities? (How can I provide the most opportunities for students to recycle information, to retrieve what they know from long-term memory, bring it into working memory to strengthen it and attach it to new information?)

These are the essential questions I try to ask myself as Im planning, for they get to the heart of whats happening in my students minds. But in order to answer these questions, I have to know my students: who they are, how they get along with their classmates, what inspires them, and more. The interaction between what I know about my students and what I know about how their minds work is the sweet spot for learning. When I sail in between both, thats when good planning happens.

Character and Success... and the Cognitive Model

How a large-scale digital analysis of teacher comments led to a new understanding of why some people excel, and how we can use this information to shape educational environments and close gaps in student preparation. What are the habits and dispositions associated with success in school? What behaviors and character traits lead to growth and development? And what do these dispositions, these so-called non-cognitive skills, mean for all the current focus on the science of learning? In the end, are habits and beliefs in fact more important than the mechanics of the mind? Or does one group shape the other? These questions lay at the heart of a task force I led that set out to address gaps in student preparation as they entered our school. Researching these questions, though, is tricky, because behaviors and character traits are not quantitative. They are qualitative; theyre descriptive. It's difficult to measure a state of mind. We didnt have a rubric; we didnt have metrics to assess character sy stematically, and as

a result we didnt have any ways to analyze student behaviors based on any pre-existing quantitative measures.

Databases and Word Frequency Lists But we realized that we did have this kind of descriptive information embedded in the end-of-term comments that teachers write for students each trimester. Every trimester, teachers write 100-150 words about each of our students, and we discovered that our database of these comments runs back to 2003. So, we were able to research and index every comment written by every teacher for every student... for nine years. For 600+ students taking 5+ classes per term for 3 terms per year, it turns out that teachers at Deerfield write 1.6 to 1.7 million words per year, for a total of 14 million words over nine years. This is a rich source of qualitative, descriptive data. But the vastness of this data created a new challenge for us: how could we access this information meaningfully and efficiently? Reading would take ages, even with a team. How could we manage this? The strategy we landed on was to use word frequency lists, which count the number of times words appear in a body of text. These kinds of lists have been used to identify habits in writing and to prove authorship of certain texts. For our needs, we discovered that we could use word frequency lists to identify which words we use in our comments for different demographics of students. By identifying the words we use in comments for our stronger students (as defined by GPA) and which words we use in our comments for our weaker students, we could begin to understand what behaviors, habits and character traits we recognize and laud in our top students, and what behaviors, habits and character traits we encourage and promote in our students who struggle.

(We also ran this data through rigorous statistical analyses, which dont make for good blog reading. Contact me if you're interested in this, and we can speak more.) Qualities of Success The results were fascinating: In our weaker students, we found we wrote about three traits: consistency, sufficiency, and focus. As a faculty, we want our students to be able be consistent, to sustain good work, day in and day out. We also promote sufficiency; through repeated use of words like enough and more, we found we encourage our weaker students to engage more fully, to produce more than the bare minimum. And, in an age of distraction, we found we encourage students to focus, whether in their work habits or in their academic thinking. In comments for our top students, we wrote about different, but similar, habits. We described their grit, their tenacity. We described their creativity. And we described their natural curiosity about their work. Our writing about our top students appears to reflect traits that contribute to these students success. These were rich results, and they provided manifold opportunities for next steps; how might we, for example, create environments that promote foundational skills of consistency, sufficiency, and focus while also allowing opportunities for curiosity, creativity, and grit? And since completing research, we've been exploring this new question and developing programs to engage and encourage these skills. Striking Parallels But what was even more interesting was the relationship that emerged between the qualities of stronger and weaker students. It didnt strike us at first, but after reflection, we recognized that the habits demonstrated by the strong students are natural extensions, natural amplifications, of the habits encouraged in the bottom:

We encourage consistency in the weaker students, and the top students demonstrated grit, which is consistency tested on a harder surface. We encourage sufficiency in our weaker students--being more productive, doing more than just the minimum--and the top students demonstrated creativity, with is the overflow of productivity, the creation of novelty. And we encourage focus, more careful attention, in our weaker students, while our top students showed curiosity, which is the intrinsically-motivated direction of attention.

Looking at these traits in this way, we began to see a spectrum of habits and behaviors in which the foundational skills we aim to develop in weaker students lead directly to the qualities associated with highperforming students. This, in turn, can inform the language we use in our conversations, the habits we promote in classes, and the kinds of lessons we develop. If we keep the teaching of these dispositions in mind, then we can scaffold the kind of behaviors that lead to success.

Curiosity, Creativity, Grit... and Cognitive Science But how does this fit with cognitive science? I share all this now, because it wasnt until much later that I recognized that what makes these different habits and traits important (at least in the context of school) is that they reflect different cognitive stages in the learning process:

Focus and curiosity are traits that promote the direction of attention, without which the entire learning process flounders. Sufficiency and creativity are traits that promote rich encoding. Through producing work, through writing, through interacting with content, through creating--through all these productive habits, we encode information richly. And consistency and grit are traits that promote recursive, repeated experiences diving into and through the whole cognitive cycle. When we hurl ourselves back into our work again and again, were focusing our attention, encoding information, letting it percolate in storage day in and day out, and retrieving it regularly. Were using working memory and long-term memory. Were mixing new material with old material, refocusing our attention and starting the learning cycle again and again.

This was a revelation, and it reconciled for me the growing gulf between cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Cognitive and non-cognitive skills are

intimately related, each informing the other, and this recognition has provided a new lens for understanding our learning, on both the micro (daily) scale and the macro (behavioral) scale.

And the Unification of our Pedagogies... But this was only the beginning. We had looked at (and continue to look at) the development of habits of mind as a way into academic success, and the search has yielded fruitful results. Now, though, we are looking to see how these qualities might undergird our curriculum. How might we promote foundational behaviors and habits (consistency, sufficiency, focus) in our foundational classes, while still allowing opportunities for characteristics of excellence (curiosity, creativity, and grit) in all our classes? ~ But building curricular models around character is only one pedagogical approach to curriculum design. How do other pedagogical approaches engage the cognitive process? If a cognitive model for learning can help us understand the relationship between the many wide-ranging dispositions that our students hold--if it can even unify them into a singular framework of learning--can the same be done with pedagogical philosophies? What could we learn from this? This, coming up in the next post.

Towards a Unification of Pedagogies

Which is best: Inquiry-based learning? Technology-driven classes? Socratic discussion? Others? These pedagogical approaches seem to have their own disciples, each claiming the One Pedagogy To Rule Them All. How is a teacher to know? How understand which to use when? And why? I used to have a "grass is always greener" feeling about this. I wondered: could everything my colleagues are doing be better than what I'm doing? I always admired (and still do) the fervent proselytizing different schools of thought attract. But clarity came for me when I made the realization in the previous blog post: that our habits and dispositions directly engage different stages of the cognitive process. When I understood that the cognitive model of attention, encoding, storage, and retrieval explains how non-cognitive skills influence learning in different ways, then I began to consider how it might similarly cast our different pedagogical strategies into a singular frame of reference built around our students. And this brought a new coherence to me for our different approaches:

Just as certain dispositions promote complementary stages of the cognitive process, so, too, do different pedagogical strategies complement each other and engage in the full process of learning: Inquiry-based teaching focuses on using targeted, guiding questions that propel and focus attention. And, when coupled with field work or other immersive scenarios or research environments, it can promote rich encoding as well. (Its important to note that it isnt that inquiry-based teaching doesnt promote good storage and retrieval--only that its focus is more explicitly on the earlier stages in the cognitive model: attention and encoding.)

The rhetoric surrounding technology in the classroom looks different; it revolves around two different arguments. First, some advocates promote technology as a tool to capture attention. This camp suggests that we compel attention through our use of tools that are relevant and familiar to the world our students know. Kids use technology every day in their lives; they ought to use it in school. There is some sense to this. Another camp argues that technology promotes rich encoding. Digital media provide fuller visual, auditory, and kinesthetic experiences than plain text. And, they say that digital sources can be adaptive. With technology, the argument goes, students are stimulated in more ways, and their environments can adaptively meet students where their prior knowledge is. Spiraling focuses on the back end of the cognitive process. A pedagogical pattern built around recursively returning to material, spiraling creates repeated exposures to content with increasing complexity, drawing information from long-term memory, re-encoding it, and providing opportunities for consolidation in storage before retrieving it again as the process starts anew. In this way, spiraling cycles through encoding, storage, and retrieval. (Here again, as with other categories, if the approach is led by a thoughtful and careful teacher, it will engage all stages of the cognitive process--but the practice explicitly focuses on a selection of them.) Similarly, Socratic questioning and seminar discussion cycles students through retrieval and encoding, as discussion constantly pulls information out of storage, and re-encoding it. But, with a similar focus on questions, like inquiry-based teaching, Socratic dialog also commands the attention of participating students. In this way, we see that even a practice 2400 years old can fully engage our cognitive lives, providing a complete cognitive experience and reminding us that old school is not necessarily bad school. ~ And so the question for teachers isn't an either/or or best/worst question. Instead, the question really is: which pedagogical approach fits the content at hand? Which suits our goals and objectives? Which suits the students we have before us? Clarifying the focal area and impact of pedagogical practices helps us see them as complementary options as opposed to competing philosophies. It helps us connect each technique to a different outcome: Do we seek to encourage reflection and re-evaluation of prior knowledge? Socratic discussion or a spiraling approach may work best. Introducing new information? Aim for the immersion and rich multi-sensory experience of experiential learning or a technology-enriched environment.

Which approaches do you understanding do they engage?

prefer?

What

stages

of

cognitive

Do you like teaching old school? Not necessarily a bad thing--remember Socrates! And this is the focus of the next post: When is old school good school?

Why Old School and New School Aren't in Conflict

Its easy these days (and a little cheap, I think) to rail against the old school classroom as a teacher-centric, autocratic learning environment. We hear this often; product marketers, overzealous reformers, and technothusiasts seem to express the sentiment that old school teaching is irrelevant in a high-tech world, or that if youre not with whats up -andcoming, youre out to lunch, and you certainly cant be providing a good educational experience for kids. But 2400 years ago, the Socratic method promoted discovery through asking questions, and weve explored how it does, indeed, provide a rich, cognitive experience. We continue to hold this kind of teaching in high esteem. And 100 years ago, Dewey codified the ideals of experiential education, arguing that primary experience is essential to constructing understanding. This is good teaching; it is a model of rich encoding, of multi-sensory experience. In fact, at over a hundred years old, it remains a foundational element of the immersive experiences that choruses of reformers advocate for today. And 50 years ago, Bloom, of course, reset our understanding of educational objectives in a way that promoted active student engagement. Movement through Bloom's taxonomy (and its revisions) requires rich, immersive work.

Because of these and many other examples, I think its important not to villainize the term old school, because history--the philosophy and practice from the past--history is what we learn from. It is flush with wisdom, and we are foolish if we ignore it or overlook it. Instead of talking, then, about old school and new school teaching, lets differentiate between good teaching, which stimulates thought and activity, and bad teaching, which stifles it. And this is a key distinction, because good teaching isnt always flashy. It doesnt require anything fancy, and it doesnt have to be expensive. (Though, sometimes fancy and expensive tools can be helpful.) Mostly, it requires thoughtfulness. It requires organized, thorough, and deliberate preparation. It requires empathy, and a degree of responsiveness in the moment. Good teaching comes from a place that understands how and what students think and feel. This doesnt have to mean a deep understanding of cognitive science--strong intuition and emotional intelligence can go about as far anything towards reading the thoughts and feelings of a room--but a systems approach to thinking certainly helps inform our work as educators. Since good, cognitive learning is an essential aim of teaching, understanding the mechanics of thought and memory provide a hearty, sensible foundation for our work. Stimulating, thoughtprovoking, action-inducing teaching is good teaching, however old it may be. Seeing new school and old school in this way--in the context of good school--is the point of this post. And it is close to a key insight that this whole series of posts aims to address: an understanding of what is new

in relation to what is old. In this case, this means one thing in particular: the relationship between the cognitive science of learning and the historical work of teaching. Certainly, another context for understanding the relationship between old and new is technology. And this will come next, in the penultimate installation: Technology, the Brain, and Teaching.