01 February 2015 / by Vincent Chieppa

Chunking information & the power it unlocks




  • The most common way of chunking information is by arbitrarily grouping it together. For example, imagine you have to remember the names of four of your students.  You will simply split them into two pairs and memorize the first pair followed by the second.



    This this refers to chunking information based on its meaning.  For instance, if you want to memorize the age of everyone in a group, you can begin by chunking the information by organizing people by their age.  The next step would be to remember the people that belong to each group.



    It comes more naturally to commit information to memory by identifying a pattern in the given information.  This is because you simply have to remember the pattern rather than a list of separate pieces of information.

    As an example, look at this letter sequence: AEIMQUY.  Did you notice that these letters are just every fourth letter of the alphabet?   So if you want to commit this information to short term memory, you now have the pattern that is the key to unlock the whole sequence.



    As we have seen, chunking information can also help overcome some short term memory restrictions.  Experiments have shown that short term memory has a limited capacity to remember 7 (plus or minus 2) chunks at a time.  Nevertheless, we are able to remember more by chunking information.

    For example, if you have to commit an (international) 11-digit phone number to your short term memory you will probably be unable to do it.  However, by chunking the information in units, you will be able to do it with greater ease.

    As an example, imagine you have to remember the phone number of your Kenyan Director of Studies (+25490573681). You will find that by chunking these numbers into groups you will now be able to remember it with ease (2-54-90-57-36-81).



    Here you will find an activity to illustrate how chunking information works.  Also, feel free to read up more about not only about chunking and other memory techniques, but also on how to apply it in the classroom:

  • The Atlantic

  • The Peak Performance Center

  • Professional Teacher Board

  • Skills Toolbox

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