Everyone wants to learn faster and effectively.
One way is to understand how the learner’s brain processes in the learning environment. Learning is the process of taking new information in your working memory and integrating it with existing knowledge in your long-term memory. Once it’s in long-term memory you can recall it and transfer the knowledge to the real world.
- Working memory: Your working memory is good at processing information, but it can only hold so much at one time. All of your active thinking happens in the working memory.
- Long-term memory: Your long-term memory is your storage center and holds your existing knowledge. In the learning process, you are connecting the new information to prior knowledge. As you actively process information, you are swapping it between working and long-term memory.
The working memory is like a white board where you can do a lot of calculations and diagramming on the fly. On the white board, you need space to both write down information (temporary storage) and do your problem-solving (active processing).
Often the problem is that you only have so much space. As the white board gets cluttered with information, you run out of room to work. That means you need to record the important information and free up space to do more work on the white board.
One way to capture the information is to create post-it notes (long-term memory) to record the information on the white board. Once you you have the notes, you are free to erase the white board and do more work. And, if you needed to recall what you did earlier, all you have to do is look at one of your notes.
As you go through an learning process, what you see and hear enters your working memory where it is temporarily stored. Your brain actively processes the new information and integrates it with what you have stored in your long-term memory.
So, your brain is doing these things:
- Receiving new information
- Actively processing the information
- Integrating the information with long-term memory
(ref: http://www.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/2007/10/)
There are numerous ways been suggested by the researchers about effective ways to transfer information to the learners. These are used to promote clear processing and life long memory of the information and teachers in classroom happen to use coloured movie clips and pens. Most of the schools have recognized the importance in providing resources and been proved to be effective.