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EdSurge
Want to Learn More Effectively? Take More Breaks, Research Suggests
By Jeffrey R. Young
Sep 16, 2020
John Sweller is one of the most influential learning science
researchers, best known for his “cognitive load theory,” which suggests
that educators should present information without extraneous details.
Otherwise, the brains of students can literally overload with what
amounts to intellectual clutter.
Sweller’s latest line of research offers a new insight: the human brain
may need regular breaks when learning to help it refresh its “working
memory” capacity.
At the heart of both lines of research is that the human brain has a
pretty limited ability to hold thoughts in working memory. “The
capacity is really just a few items of information—that’s all we can
deal with at any given time,” Sweller said this week in an interview
with EdSurge from his home in Australia, where he is a professor
emeritus at the University of New South Wales at Sydney. “We can’t hold
information for more than about 20 seconds without repeating it to
ourselves,” he added. Just try remembering a new phone number while
doing some other task to see for yourself.
“If a student is having trouble understanding something, what we
mean is that their working memory is overwhelmed,” Sweller said.
That’s not to say that brains are not awe-inspiring computing machines.
The secret is to match that limited working memory with the vast
storage space in long-term memory, which he says has no known limit.
“In order to preserve the contents [in] long-term memory, only very
limited amounts of novel information can be processed at any given
time,” he and his colleagues wrote in a recent research paper.
Sweller and other researchers have long assumed that the power of
working memory is constant—that it works equally well all the time. In
his latest series of experiments, though, Sweller and his colleagues
found that working memory can suffer from what he calls “resource
depletion.” In other words, our working memories may get worn out from
excessive use.
“It’s beginning to look like with working memory, if you’ve been
concentrating on something for a long period of time without a rest,
you would have some difficulty keeping on going,” he said. In other
words, after a long period of focused learning, “your poor working
memory becomes worse.”
It looks like working memory does recover quickly once someone takes a
break from a mentally challenging task. Specifically, Sweller suggests
working for 20 or 30 minutes and then taking about a five minute break
to refresh. He stresses that so far this hypothesis is a theory backed
by a few small studies, and that more research is needed.
This aspect of brain function may help explain a long-standing phenomenon in learning science known as the “spacing effect.”
That effect, which has been replicated in many studies, finds that
students retain information better if learning sessions are spaced out
over time rather than crammed into one mass block of time. Sweller said
that if working memory wears out during cramming, that might explain
why spacing out study sessions leads to better results.
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