Understanding the ‘how’ of learning from cognitive science: What strategies can help students retain and recall information more successfully?

An understanding of the thinking processes that pupils go through is helpful, from planning lessons to delivery. Literacy tasks, by their very nature, demand focus. Therefore, a consideration of working memory capacity and cognitive load can help you to plan tasks with improved accessibility for all pupils. Retention and recall rely on understanding the information presented. Presenting too much information at once can result in cognitive overload (Sweller, 1998), meaning information is unlikely to be retained.   What does it mean? Research into working memory, capacity and effective storage of information has identified several strategies to support the successful storage of new information (Alloway and Alloway, 2015). Chunking information leads to schemas which makes retrieval easier. Limiting the amount of information and then repeating that information reduces the cognitive load and strain on working memory, thus increasing the chances of it being retained. Long ter