Information Processing Blog Post 2

The input knowledge is that a student learns about the solar system and the order in which the planets are in starting from the sun.

The student uses sensory memory by paying close attention to what the teacher was wearing and what colors the teacher wrote on the board with. The student also pays attention to the drawing that the teacher does on the board as a model of the solar system. Each planet is a specific size circle and the student notices each size of the circle.

This information is lost through the loss if attention that the student gives. If the students starts to focus on his/her desk and not the board, the information is lost.

The students must pay clear attention to the information about the planets and be focused in order to retain the information. The teacher must also keep the lesson engaging and help the students stay focused so that they are not the only ones working to be focused. The teacher must help the students be focused by keeping them actively engaged. This can include incorporating activities, like coloring and drawing a student's own perspective of the solar system. Pattern recognition should occur here as well. Teachers should describe each planet in order based on size, color, weight, and structure. An easy way to remember the solar system and order of planets is SMVEMJSUNP. Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto or in a sentence like Sally, My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.

This information is now stored in the students' working memory. The information is being put to use during a quiz that the students have to take that asks the students to put the planets in order starting from the sun. Students rehearse the information over and over to themselves before the quiz so that it can be remembered. This is known as maintenance rehearsal because it involves repeating information over and over so it is maintained. The chunking that occurs relates back to the mnemonics that was taught earlier by the teacher, so the students rehearse this information from this mnemonic. The students can forget the information they learned if they fail to rehearse the information in the mnemonic sentence that the teacher taught as a reminder of an easy way to remember, also there could be encoding failure, which means that the information never reached the long-term memory stage.

Once the information is encoded into the memory, the sentence that represents the order of the planets becomes automatic to students. Ultimately, students would be able to store the order of the planets in their long-term memory. This knowledge is called explicit knowledge because it refers to information that we are consciously aware of and use, like academic information, which includes this planet information. This information can be retrieved from long-term memory through retrieval cues, or hints about where to look for a particular piece of information. If the student refers back to the day they learned the order of the planets, he/she will remember the sentence that was taught and remember the order of the planets.