Learning That Sticks

A Brain-Based Model for K-12 Instructional Design and Delivery

Bryan Goodwin, Tonia Gibson, Kristin Rouleau

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781416629139
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

In far too many classrooms, the emphasis is on instructional strategies that teachers employ rather than on what students should be doing or thinking about as part of their learning. What's more, students' minds are something of a mysterious "black box" for most teachers, so when learning breaks down, they're not sure what went wrong or what to do differently to help students learn.

It doesn't have to be this way.

Learning That Sticks helps you look inside that black box. Bryan Goodwin and his coauthors unpack the cognitive science underlying research-supported learning strategies so you can sequence them into experiences that challenge, inspire, and engage your students. As a result, you'll learn to teach with more intentionality—understanding not just what to do but also when and why to do it.

By way of an easy-to-use six-phase model of learning, this book* Analyzes how the brain reacts to, stores, and retrieves new information.
* Helps you "zoom out" to understand the process of learning from beginning to end.
* Helps you "zoom in" to see what's going on in students' minds during each phase.

Learning may be complicated, but learning about learning doesn't have to be. And to that end, Learning That Sticks helps shine a light into all the black boxes in your classroom and make your practice the most powerful it can be.

This product is a copublication of ASCD and McREL.

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Chapter 1

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Understanding the Science of Learning

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What you'll learn in this book isn't new or faddish. It's based on carefully designed studies of learning reported in peer-reviewed publications that have been around for many decades. Some of it, in fact, dates back to the 1870s when an amateur scientist in Germany, Hermann Ebbinghaus, began a series of unusual experiments on a singular subject—himself.

Each evening, at the same hour, Ebbinghaus would sit alone in a quiet room and pull from a box small sheets of paper with different nonsense syllables on each—drawn from a list of 2,300 nonsense syllables he carefully created (e.g., mox, fim, tib). After writing down each syllable in a notebook, he'd start a metronome and, following its rhythm, recite each syllable on the list in a monotone voice in equally spaced intervals. Afterward, he'd close his notebook and attempt to recall the list from memory, over and over, until he could recall them all.

From this lonely and tedious work, Ebbinghaus arrived at many important insights into the inner workings of our minds, including our "forgetting curve" (how quickly we forget new learning) and ways to strengthen memory (Boring, 1957). Perhaps most important, through his exacting and methodical experimentation, he began to turn what had previously been mostly just philosophical musings about the mind into a scientific pursuit, paving the way for study and exploration of how we learn.

The Information Processing Model

Starting in the 1950s, cognitive scientists developed what's commonly referred to as the information processing model, which uses the computer as an admittedly imperfect metaphor for what happens to information once it enters the brain. Basically, the information processing model attempts to map the long, perilous journey—full of twists, turns, and dead ends—that all new information must take before finding a home in our long-term memories. As you'll discover, the human brain is both shockingly powerful and maddeningly inconsistent. Sometimes it forgets things that its owner wishes desperately to remember (What's the name of my boss's husband? Where did I park the getaway car?). Sometimes it remembers things that its owner wishes desperately to forget (an unkind word or an annoying jingle).

In many ways, the challenge of learning is rooted in a fundamental paradox of the human brain. Although it can learn and retain staggering amounts of information, it's also incredibly adept at ignoring and forgetting information, which in many ways is a good thing. If we paid attention to every stimulus in our environment, we'd be nervous wrecks with our heads on a swivel, trying to pay attention to everything that's happening around us. And if we couldn't forget anything, we'd grow progressively unable to cope with the world as our brains clogged with useless information.

In fact, too much memory can be annoying—even lethal. Consider the curious case of Jill Price, who at first blush appears to possess what seems like a superpower: the ability to never forget. Now in her early 50s, she can recall events from her teens like they occurred yesterday. Ask her what she was doing on August 29, 1980, and she'll tell you, "It was a Friday. I went to Palm Springs with my friends, twins Nina and Michelle, and their family for Labor Day weekend."

The first time she heard Rick Springfield's "Jessie's Girl"? March 7, 1981. She was driving in a car with her mother yelling at her. The third time she drove a car? January 10, 1981. It was a Saturday. She was at "Teen Auto. That's where we used to get our driving lessons from" (McRobbie, 2017).

Price is among a group of rare people who have been clinically tested and found to have hyperthymesia or HSAM (highly superior autobiographical memory): the ability to recall abnormally vast details from their lives. They can remember minutiae from years earlier, such as every meal they've eaten, every phone number they've written down, and every song they've heard on the radio. Sounds awesome, yes? But in reality, not so much. Price will tell you that having "total recall" memory creates a swirling mess in her head and leaves her teetering on the edge of sanity.

My memory has ruled my life. Whenever I see a date flash on the television (or anywhere else for that matter), I automatically go back to that day and remember where I was, what I was doing, what day it fell on, and on and on and on and on. It is nonstop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting. … Most have called it a gift, but I call it a burden. I run my entire life through my head every day and it drives me crazy! (Parker, Cahill, & McGaugh, 2006, p. 35)

The Stages of Memory

Recent studies in neuroscience are finding that our brains appear actively and purposefully to forget most of what we learn—continually pruning and clearing out old and unneeded memories (often as we sleep) to allow us to focus on more important information. As it turns out, forgetting is as important to our memory systems as remembering (Richards & Frankland, 2017). Forgetting extraneous information simplifies our memories, decreasing the static hiss of the noisy, information-rich worlds in which we live and allowing us to focus on the pertinent details needed to make better decisions.

So, for the sake of our mental health and happiness, it's good that most of us ignore and forget the vast majority of what we experience. For learning, though? Not so great. As educators, we are locked in a constant battle with our students' brains, which by design are programmed to ignore or forget most of what's in their environment, including what we attempt to share with them in our classrooms. Therefore, let's take a look at the stages of memory, followed by the phases of learning with which they intersect, to build a mental model of the learning system.

Sensory Register: Finding a Signal in the Noise

Before memories can be created, we must notice some initial information with one or more of our five senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell—or our related senses of movement and balance. Our nerves convert these stimuli into electrical signals that travel along our body's nerve fibers in milliseconds, racing with incredible urgency to arrive in our brains where—surprise!—the vast majority of stimuli are promptly discarded in less than a second.

Why does this happen? Well, there's simply too much going on around us every second of the day for our minds to remember it all in full detail. Our bodies are designed for survival in a hostile environment, and to survive, our early ancestors primarily needed to pay attention to and remember the really important stuff—things that kept us safe from predators, nourished, and sheltered. For example, it was important to be able to ignore our hunting companion prattling on about his digestive issues and narrow our focus down to a tiny pinhole of stimuli: a lion making its way toward us through the savannah grass while licking its chops. The ability to filter distractions down to a pinhole was a good thing—it was the difference between living to tell the tale and being a lion's lunch.

Even now, hundreds of thousands of years later, most of what we sense throughout our day can be simply ignored. In fact, our brains' ability to filter out distractions (which I'm doing right now as I write this paragraph on my laptop while sitting outdoors at my daughters' swim meet, surrounded by screaming kids, loud music, towels flapping in the breeze, and people walking by, to name but a few stimuli) is often essential in helping us focus on the stimuli that are most important to us at the moment. Yet as teachers, it means we must ensure students focus their "pinholes" on what we want them to learn.

The next time you walk into your school or office, try to observe and remember everything you're seeing, hearing, and feeling for as long as you can: the color and shape of every car in the parking lot, the conversations of people you pass by, the feeling of a light breeze or sun on your face, the clothes and facial expressions worn by every person you see. This is the sensory register, and it's impossible to hold on to every single input all at once and for any length of time. Only a tiny fraction of what registers gets retained. And as we'll see, "rules" in our brains form something of a pecking order for which information we pay attention to and which we ignore.

Stimuli that make it through the filters of our sensory registers and are deemed important enough can begin moving along a journey through three phases of memory: immediate, working, and long-term. This is true regardless of the type of memory in play, declarative or procedural, although the area of the brain that leaps into action varies. Declarative memory, which is the recall of facts, information, and personal experiences, is stored across the neocortex—the large, gray, wrinkly outer part of the brain—and deeper down, inside the hippocampus and the amygdala near the center of your brain. It is further divided into episodic memory (recollections of events we personally experience) and semantic memory (facts and information we have learned).

Procedural memory refers to the memories that allow us to repeat physical actions and skills, such as how to ride a bicycle or draw a portrait. These performance-based memories are stored in the basal ganglia and cerebellum, which coordinate our movement, balance, and equilibrium (Queensland Brain Institute, n.d.). Experiments by neuroscientists have found that our procedural memories, once established, are very strong and far less likely to fade over time than our declarative memories, which is why we can remember how to ride a bicycle years after our last pedal around the block (Suchan, 2018).

Immediate Memory: The First 30 Seconds

Those lucky few sensory inputs that make it through our initial filters are carried along by electrical signals to neurons that then produce a biochemical charge that records, or encodes, the impression of that stimulus. Then it passes along this code to a thousand other neurons to which it is connected; each neuron can then help store and recall multiple memories (Reber, 2010). Later, when you try to recall a particular memory, that group of neurons fires the same biochemical code associated with it, re-creating the memory in your mind (Mastin, n.d.).

Our initial, immediate memory is short term, lasting only about 30 seconds. It also has limited capacity, as Harvard psychologist and researcher George Miller discovered in the 1950s. Through a series of experiments, he found that our brains can actively focus on and work with approximately seven bits of information at a time (Miller, 1956). The bits of information for what Miller called the Magic Number 7 range from small singular items such as a letter of the alphabet or a single number to chunks of information that the brain is able to group together because of some connection, such as words or mathematical functions.

Try juggling more than seven of these bits at a time, and most of us will begin to mentally stumble and forget some data points, letting some of the information fall to the floor, so to speak (Harvard University Department of Psychology, n.d.). We can thank Miller for our relatively short phone numbers, as it was his research that persuaded phone companies around the world to limit local phone numbers to seven digits. A reexamination of Miller's research (University of South Wales, 2012), however, suggests the magic number may be closer to four, because what we really seem to be doing when we encode a seven-digit number, such as 6458937, is break it into four shorter chunks, such as 64, 58, 93, and 7.

Between four and seven items at a time in our immediate memory—doesn't sound like much, does it? But think about the student activities taking place in your classroom on a daily b...