Information Processing Blog Post 2

This model can be used to describe how a child would learn the fifty states. The input is the actual data, which in the case is the fifty states. Sensory memory would occur first, when the child is first introduced to the states. Sensory memory would include all of the countless bits of information that are occurring during the lesson. Examples of data being taken in would be the firmness of the desk, the temperature of the classroom, the sound of the teacher’s voice, and what the teacher is wearing. It would also include the lesson- the map of the United States, the list of the fifty different states on the board, and the sound of the teacher naming the states. Loss can occur during sensory memory is the students’ attention is not kept on what the teaching is saying/doing. 

In order to keep the students’ attention, the teacher must make the lesson engaging and interesting. The teacher must organize and present the fifty states in a way in which engages students (by having them participate directly in the lesson), having an organized plan, and many other methods. One way to keep a child’s attention is by making the information personally important. The teacher can ask students what state they were born in or live in, or what states they have visited, in order to make the lesson relevant and keep students’ attention. Pattern recognition can also occur during this stage, in which students start to match the state’s name with its shape.

Once the child pays attention to the topic, the information is transferred to the child’s working memory. Working memory involves encoding the names, shapes, and locations of the fifty states. The information is modified or reformatted in order to prepare it for long-term storage.  The child will start to not only process and store the information, but understand it. The child will rehearse the information in order to movie it to long-term storage. Rehearsal involves repeating information over and over. The teacher may point to a state and have the student say what state it is many times. The teacher can then involve chunking. He/She can have students rehearse states in one particular region (the Midwest, or East Coast, for example), or by alphabetical order, which will make the information more meaningful and easier to remember. Forgetting can happen in a number of ways. If the teacher forgets to teach or rehearse a certain state(s) with the student, or the child may have a retrieval failure and simply forget where Vermont is located.

Encoding and retrieval will start to happen when the facts (the fifty states) have been rehearsed have started to be stored for a long period of time. Seeing a map of the states and rehearsing the locations, shapes, and names of the states can help encoding and retrieval. Giving students a blank map of the states and having them fill in the state names (known as recall) is a great practice of retrieval.

Long-term memory is the last stage in the information processing theory. Information stored in long-term memory can be retained for days, weeks, and even years. The fifty states fall under declarative knowledge, which is a compilation of facts. Once the declarative knowledge has been properly encoded, rehearsed, and can be retrieved, it can be stored in long-term memory.