Top 10 Most Effective Learning Strategies 10. Imagery for text

Mastering Knowledge: What To Do To Get There

So now we have talked about working memory - where we process information - and long-term memory - where we store it. What about understanding? How can we go from processing content, memorising it to actually understanding it and being able to use it to solve new problems? A very nice model to understand this is the one created by Dr Efrat Furst.. In the model, she explains how we go from simply knowing we have seen something before to properly mastering that knowledge.
In the first stage, we can simply differentiate something old from something new. It’s like students could tell from a list of names, which ones they have already studied. That doesn’t mean they actually remember information about those historical characters - they simply recognise the name.
The next stage is to understand a piece of information, that is, to give meaning to it. In order to do that, pupils need to link the new knowledge to something they already master. For example, we can recognise a word in another language, but we only understand it, when we can relate its meaning to the word in your native language, which we already master.
But even when we understand the meaning of something, it still doesn’t guarantee we will remember it for a long time. To go from understanding to mastering, we need to use that knowledge - over and over again. Let’s go back to the example of learning a new language. If you ask someone fluent on a second language how they managed to learn it. They will probably tell you that they lived in that country, or knew someone to talk to, or some way in which they actually practiced over and over again. And if they were practising by listening to the same audio, the results would not be as effective as when they practised putting themselves in different situations and using the language in different contexts.
This is Dr Furst's model of how we learn by practicing until we master a knowledge:

Cognitive load theory

Remember when we said working memory is like a limited shoebox? How relevant is this to teaching and learning? Well, a lot. Some even say it is the most important thing for teachers to know.
Cognitive load theory is about using techniques that optimise learning while respecting students’ working memory capacity. It has two main assumptions:

1. Our working memory has limited capacity. There is only so much new knowledge we can process at one point.

2. Our ability to use information already stored in memory is unlimited.

One aim of CLT is to manage working memory load. This term refers to how much of our Working Memory “shoebox” is being used at one moment. If the box is too empty, there is enough room to process information but there won’t be much to be learned. If the box is too full, there is a lot to be learned but we won’t have the necessary free space to do so.