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Do I Have Your Attention? Understanding Memory Constraints and Maximizing Learning
- GenresNonfictionEducation
146 pages, Paperback
Published January 29, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 28, 2025
Insightful and practical - loved the neuroscience tidbits and classroom applications
July 19, 2025
This review is more for me than the public; I'm writing it to help me remember this book's excellent content.
The first half of the book lays out the science of how humans commit things to memory, and the second half provides practical suggestions for classroom space and lesson delivery that incorporate insights from the first half of the book. Before I read the second half, I thought I'd summarize (from memory, so retrieval practice) the first half as well as predict what suggestions Harvard will provide in the 2nd half.
Part One
The research that surprised me the most from the first half was the idea that redundancy is a HINDRANCE to memorization. For example, having words on a slide AND reading the words out loud to your students is redundant, and it will actually make it harder for them to remember the content. If I remember the terms correctly, redundancy in teaching is an extraneous load that adds to the students' cognitive load for that lesson. The greater the cognitive load from the content itself, the less the extraneous load (the style of content delivery) should be. Harvard gives an example of assigning questions for students to answer as a low extraneous load, whereas a project with many involved steps has a high extraneous load.
I just looked up the terms: they are extraneous load and intrinsic load, which together are referred to as the cognitive load. Because I just looked up "intrinsic load" and wrote it down, I might feel like I have learned that term. However, this is overconfidence, which is a memory pitfall Harvard discusses. I have no way of knowing if I have learned the term "intrinsic load" unless I try to pull this information solely from my own brain. Having just looked it up and typed the term, I feel like I know it when really I do not. Harvard explains that his students will study by reviewing their notes, saying to themselves, "Yep, I know this, yep, got it." But when the assessment comes, students actually do not remember the content of their notes. This is a real problem in learning. Harvard quoted Dr. Richard Feynman as saying something along the lines of, "It is important not to be fooled when you are learning something, and the easiest person to fool is yourself." (The actual quote is "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool,"] which shows me that I have not learned this quote yet, though I have earned the idea of the second part of the quote.). The point of what I'm summarizing is that overconfidence is a problem in learning, and a way to deal with this overconfidence is by frequent formative assessments.
The working memory can hold 4-9 chunks of information at one time, says Harvard. What's really interesting about this fact is that you can hold more information if you can chunk it more effectively. A simple example is that I cannot rememberall at one time--it's ten digits or chunks of information . 12470280972. I'll attempt it here quickly:
124780972. Not bad, but I missed the "02" between the 7 and 8. But I can remember these numbers if I chunk them more effectively:
1 800 942 2727.
Here's my attempt: 1 800 942 2727. Easy. What Harvard explains is that the more background knowledge a student has on a content area, the easier it will be for that student to chunk that information, and thus the more information they can hold in their working memory.
He also explains the fallacy of "multitasking," which is impossible for our brains to do. What people mean when they say "multitasking" is task-switching, but he proves that it's less efficient to switch tasks back and forth than it is to work on one task at a time. (You can prove this to yourself: time yourself writing first the alphabet out on a piece of paper, then 1-26 out on a piece of paper. The second time, time yourself switching back and forth, writing A1B2C3D4 out on a piece of paper. You will get a faster time the first time than you will the second time.)
Additionally, some research has shown that there is more memory loss when learning things via task-switching compared to learning by steady focus on one thing.
The two best study methods, Harvard explained, our retrieval practice and spaced practice.
Harvard suggests a simple poster to hang up on a classroom wall: sense-->attend-->rehearse. That is the (simplified) way human beings learn new things. A choke point he mentions is at the attend step--since humans can't truly multitask, we can only attend to one thing at a time. When we are sitting in class with our laptop and/or our cell phone, our attention will be divided and we will not learn as well. Students think they can browse Amazon, for example, while listening to the lecture and suffer no detriment of knowledge acquisition. That is simply not true (it's another example of overconfidence in learning). Moreover, Harvard explains how laptops and students who are demonstrating off-task behaviors are distracting to students around them. So, teachers must work hard to eliminate distractions from the classroom.
Another interesting thing Harvard mentioned is that classroom posters or even student work hung on the walls can be distracting. This, along with what Harvard said about redundancy, were the two things that surprised me in part one.
Part Two
In the spirit of retrieval practice, I will write this part of the review just from my own brain, not using the book or my buddies. Here I allude to a useful protocol invented by Blake Harvard: "Brain, Book, Buddy." Teachers have students take a pre-assessment first using their own brains. Then students can use the [text]book or their own notes to answer questions they couldn't answer at first. Finally, students can consult their peers (those they sit next to, etc.) for answers. Students use highlighters to color code which questions they answered with their brain (green), with their book (yellow), or with their buddy (blue, but I think red/pink would make more sense as it forms a stoplight).
Another protocol Harvard invented was having students, after taking a pre-assessment, categorize the items on the pre-assessment as follows: known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. The last category a student would not be aware of, of course, but the pre-assessment could bring "unknown unknowns" to light: for example, students might learn from this assessment that they would get questions on negative reinforcement wrong, though they thought they knew that concept well. I like Brain, Book, Buddy better, I think, but this could be a useful tool just to introduce the idea of "unknown unknowns."
He also had great tips based on the adage: The one talking is the one doing the learning, which Harvard tweaks to "The one thinking is the one learning." (He similarly says that the more effort students put into their studying technique or schoolwork, the more they will learn as a result.) Asking questions of your classroom benefits ONLY students who think about the answer and raise their hands; I know from my experience cold-calling students that those who don't raise their hand are not invested in the question and often can not come up with an answer, even when pressed. Thus, teachers should have students write down their answers to the questions asked out loud in class. Now that I think about it, this would be an easy way to administer a pre-assessment: have students write down answers to questions you ask aloud.
Harvard had an interesting worksheet [see page 103] for students to go through a small handful of multiple choice questions and analyze which is the correct answer, which is the trickiest incorrect answer (and then students have to rewrite the question to make that tricky answer correct), how does this question connect to prior learning, how does this question connect to their own life, etc. It seems a little bloated, but aspects of it I can use in my own teaching.
I now have to look at the book because I can't remember what else Harvard talked about.
Ah, yes: Harvard mentioned how students can study more effectively with flashcards. When one student drills another, only the student being drilled benefits. A fix for this is to have one student lay the flashcard face up between the two students, and have both students write their answer down before flipping the card for the answer. This principle can apply to review games, too: when students work in teams, have each student in each team write down their answer before someone in the team takes the lead to submit their answer to the class.
Another cool idea is to have students write multiple-choice questions to fulfill a given set of answers that the teacher provides. For example, the teacher provides
a. Schizophrenia
b. Bipolar disorder
C. Generalized anxiety disorder
D. Obsessive-compulsive disorder
E. Major depressive disorder
And students have to come up with five multiple-choice questions, each of which has a different correct answer. Harvard says to create buy-in, he uses the best student questions on the actual assessment.
Another idea he had is called a "brain dump," where he gives students a prompt like this: "Explain the process of vision, including structures and their functions." This taps into the "goal-free effect" from cognitive load theory: open-ended prompts that do not have specific "answers" for students to provide give them space to remember all they can about a topic. He calls this writing assignment a brain dump because an open-ended prompt sparks students to get down on paper everything they can think of regarding a topic. For students who are struggling to come up with anything, he provides "cheat sheets" a few minutes into this activity that list things like "Iris, Cornea, Retina, Lens" to prompt students, but he encourages students who do not need help not to use the cheat sheet. It's best for them to see what they know already in their brains. This activity, of course, also doubles as retrieval practice. In my classroom, I could easily use "brain dumps" as journals. Finally, Harvard says he has students "pair and share" at the conclusion of this activity so they can see what they came up with that another student did not and vice versa.
He had another protocol called "Color Coding Like Material" which didn't seem that effective. It seems too easy for students to color-code mindlessly or irrationally, even though he has students write a paragraph based on each color. Also, this seems like it would be a pain to grade.
About spaced practice, Harvard says students need time to forget. That is, actually, quite a revolutionary concept: we need to acknowledge and, dare I say, champion students' forgetting! The final main point Harvard lists for his summary of part 2 is, "Forgetting is normal. It is part of the learning process."
Interestingly, the optimal spacing time between teaching sessions is weeks long if not months, and Harvard says that kind of spacing is not "reasonable for the classroom" (122). He simply suggests, "Any spacing is better than no spacing" (123).
Harvard talks about modifying exit tickets to make them more useful. Of course, if students were halfway engaged, they would remember the content they just learned in that day's lesson, which is why exit tickets actually measure performance (how well did the students attend to today's lesson) vs. what students actually committed to memory. One simple fix is to use entrance tickets instead of exit tickets. Another fix is to use what Harvard calls "Last Lesson, Last Week, Last Month" exit tickets. The explanation is really in the name: have at least three questions on your exit question, at least one from each of these three categories. Harvard says this works especially well if something you taught a month ago connects in some way to what you taught today.
Finally, in addition to talking about forgetting as a positive and necessary aspect of the learning process, Harvard spends the last chapter delineating how he uses the first six days of school to model spaced practice and retrieval. He does this by being transparent with his students about his process of learning their names, discussing what he's doing with them when he has them either display their nametag on their desk or put it face down so he can't see their names, letting them see his failures and forgetting, etc. It is a cool idea in general to demonstrate to our students how we ourselves learn; in our modeling, we make the learning process--the forgetting, our overconfidence in what we think we know, and the benefit of retrieval practice and spaced practice--an accepted and normal part of our classroom.
The first half of the book lays out the science of how humans commit things to memory, and the second half provides practical suggestions for classroom space and lesson delivery that incorporate insights from the first half of the book. Before I read the second half, I thought I'd summarize (from memory, so retrieval practice) the first half as well as predict what suggestions Harvard will provide in the 2nd half.
Part One
The research that surprised me the most from the first half was the idea that redundancy is a HINDRANCE to memorization. For example, having words on a slide AND reading the words out loud to your students is redundant, and it will actually make it harder for them to remember the content. If I remember the terms correctly, redundancy in teaching is an extraneous load that adds to the students' cognitive load for that lesson. The greater the cognitive load from the content itself, the less the extraneous load (the style of content delivery) should be. Harvard gives an example of assigning questions for students to answer as a low extraneous load, whereas a project with many involved steps has a high extraneous load.
I just looked up the terms: they are extraneous load and intrinsic load, which together are referred to as the cognitive load. Because I just looked up "intrinsic load" and wrote it down, I might feel like I have learned that term. However, this is overconfidence, which is a memory pitfall Harvard discusses. I have no way of knowing if I have learned the term "intrinsic load" unless I try to pull this information solely from my own brain. Having just looked it up and typed the term, I feel like I know it when really I do not. Harvard explains that his students will study by reviewing their notes, saying to themselves, "Yep, I know this, yep, got it." But when the assessment comes, students actually do not remember the content of their notes. This is a real problem in learning. Harvard quoted Dr. Richard Feynman as saying something along the lines of, "It is important not to be fooled when you are learning something, and the easiest person to fool is yourself." (The actual quote is "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool,"] which shows me that I have not learned this quote yet, though I have earned the idea of the second part of the quote.). The point of what I'm summarizing is that overconfidence is a problem in learning, and a way to deal with this overconfidence is by frequent formative assessments.
The working memory can hold 4-9 chunks of information at one time, says Harvard. What's really interesting about this fact is that you can hold more information if you can chunk it more effectively. A simple example is that I cannot rememberall at one time--it's ten digits or chunks of information . 12470280972. I'll attempt it here quickly:
124780972. Not bad, but I missed the "02" between the 7 and 8. But I can remember these numbers if I chunk them more effectively:
1 800 942 2727.
Here's my attempt: 1 800 942 2727. Easy. What Harvard explains is that the more background knowledge a student has on a content area, the easier it will be for that student to chunk that information, and thus the more information they can hold in their working memory.
He also explains the fallacy of "multitasking," which is impossible for our brains to do. What people mean when they say "multitasking" is task-switching, but he proves that it's less efficient to switch tasks back and forth than it is to work on one task at a time. (You can prove this to yourself: time yourself writing first the alphabet out on a piece of paper, then 1-26 out on a piece of paper. The second time, time yourself switching back and forth, writing A1B2C3D4 out on a piece of paper. You will get a faster time the first time than you will the second time.)
Additionally, some research has shown that there is more memory loss when learning things via task-switching compared to learning by steady focus on one thing.
The two best study methods, Harvard explained, our retrieval practice and spaced practice.
Harvard suggests a simple poster to hang up on a classroom wall: sense-->attend-->rehearse. That is the (simplified) way human beings learn new things. A choke point he mentions is at the attend step--since humans can't truly multitask, we can only attend to one thing at a time. When we are sitting in class with our laptop and/or our cell phone, our attention will be divided and we will not learn as well. Students think they can browse Amazon, for example, while listening to the lecture and suffer no detriment of knowledge acquisition. That is simply not true (it's another example of overconfidence in learning). Moreover, Harvard explains how laptops and students who are demonstrating off-task behaviors are distracting to students around them. So, teachers must work hard to eliminate distractions from the classroom.
Another interesting thing Harvard mentioned is that classroom posters or even student work hung on the walls can be distracting. This, along with what Harvard said about redundancy, were the two things that surprised me in part one.
Part Two
In the spirit of retrieval practice, I will write this part of the review just from my own brain, not using the book or my buddies. Here I allude to a useful protocol invented by Blake Harvard: "Brain, Book, Buddy." Teachers have students take a pre-assessment first using their own brains. Then students can use the [text]book or their own notes to answer questions they couldn't answer at first. Finally, students can consult their peers (those they sit next to, etc.) for answers. Students use highlighters to color code which questions they answered with their brain (green), with their book (yellow), or with their buddy (blue, but I think red/pink would make more sense as it forms a stoplight).
Another protocol Harvard invented was having students, after taking a pre-assessment, categorize the items on the pre-assessment as follows: known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. The last category a student would not be aware of, of course, but the pre-assessment could bring "unknown unknowns" to light: for example, students might learn from this assessment that they would get questions on negative reinforcement wrong, though they thought they knew that concept well. I like Brain, Book, Buddy better, I think, but this could be a useful tool just to introduce the idea of "unknown unknowns."
He also had great tips based on the adage: The one talking is the one doing the learning, which Harvard tweaks to "The one thinking is the one learning." (He similarly says that the more effort students put into their studying technique or schoolwork, the more they will learn as a result.) Asking questions of your classroom benefits ONLY students who think about the answer and raise their hands; I know from my experience cold-calling students that those who don't raise their hand are not invested in the question and often can not come up with an answer, even when pressed. Thus, teachers should have students write down their answers to the questions asked out loud in class. Now that I think about it, this would be an easy way to administer a pre-assessment: have students write down answers to questions you ask aloud.
Harvard had an interesting worksheet [see page 103] for students to go through a small handful of multiple choice questions and analyze which is the correct answer, which is the trickiest incorrect answer (and then students have to rewrite the question to make that tricky answer correct), how does this question connect to prior learning, how does this question connect to their own life, etc. It seems a little bloated, but aspects of it I can use in my own teaching.
I now have to look at the book because I can't remember what else Harvard talked about.
Ah, yes: Harvard mentioned how students can study more effectively with flashcards. When one student drills another, only the student being drilled benefits. A fix for this is to have one student lay the flashcard face up between the two students, and have both students write their answer down before flipping the card for the answer. This principle can apply to review games, too: when students work in teams, have each student in each team write down their answer before someone in the team takes the lead to submit their answer to the class.
Another cool idea is to have students write multiple-choice questions to fulfill a given set of answers that the teacher provides. For example, the teacher provides
a. Schizophrenia
b. Bipolar disorder
C. Generalized anxiety disorder
D. Obsessive-compulsive disorder
E. Major depressive disorder
And students have to come up with five multiple-choice questions, each of which has a different correct answer. Harvard says to create buy-in, he uses the best student questions on the actual assessment.
Another idea he had is called a "brain dump," where he gives students a prompt like this: "Explain the process of vision, including structures and their functions." This taps into the "goal-free effect" from cognitive load theory: open-ended prompts that do not have specific "answers" for students to provide give them space to remember all they can about a topic. He calls this writing assignment a brain dump because an open-ended prompt sparks students to get down on paper everything they can think of regarding a topic. For students who are struggling to come up with anything, he provides "cheat sheets" a few minutes into this activity that list things like "Iris, Cornea, Retina, Lens" to prompt students, but he encourages students who do not need help not to use the cheat sheet. It's best for them to see what they know already in their brains. This activity, of course, also doubles as retrieval practice. In my classroom, I could easily use "brain dumps" as journals. Finally, Harvard says he has students "pair and share" at the conclusion of this activity so they can see what they came up with that another student did not and vice versa.
He had another protocol called "Color Coding Like Material" which didn't seem that effective. It seems too easy for students to color-code mindlessly or irrationally, even though he has students write a paragraph based on each color. Also, this seems like it would be a pain to grade.
About spaced practice, Harvard says students need time to forget. That is, actually, quite a revolutionary concept: we need to acknowledge and, dare I say, champion students' forgetting! The final main point Harvard lists for his summary of part 2 is, "Forgetting is normal. It is part of the learning process."
Interestingly, the optimal spacing time between teaching sessions is weeks long if not months, and Harvard says that kind of spacing is not "reasonable for the classroom" (122). He simply suggests, "Any spacing is better than no spacing" (123).
Harvard talks about modifying exit tickets to make them more useful. Of course, if students were halfway engaged, they would remember the content they just learned in that day's lesson, which is why exit tickets actually measure performance (how well did the students attend to today's lesson) vs. what students actually committed to memory. One simple fix is to use entrance tickets instead of exit tickets. Another fix is to use what Harvard calls "Last Lesson, Last Week, Last Month" exit tickets. The explanation is really in the name: have at least three questions on your exit question, at least one from each of these three categories. Harvard says this works especially well if something you taught a month ago connects in some way to what you taught today.
Finally, in addition to talking about forgetting as a positive and necessary aspect of the learning process, Harvard spends the last chapter delineating how he uses the first six days of school to model spaced practice and retrieval. He does this by being transparent with his students about his process of learning their names, discussing what he's doing with them when he has them either display their nametag on their desk or put it face down so he can't see their names, letting them see his failures and forgetting, etc. It is a cool idea in general to demonstrate to our students how we ourselves learn; in our modeling, we make the learning process--the forgetting, our overconfidence in what we think we know, and the benefit of retrieval practice and spaced practice--an accepted and normal part of our classroom.
August 8, 2025
There are some useful parts to this book; I enjoyed reading about how memory works, and I have no qualms about retrieval and spaced practice. However, it feels very much like the author learns one way and assumes that that is the only way to learn. I don’t think all of the author’s ideas about how to apply the cognitive science in teaching are necessarily relevant in an elementary setting. Perhaps I was reading too much into some of his conclusions, but I didn’t feel that some of his conclusions resonated with the way that I’ve always learned or performed tasks. 🤷♀️
June 19, 2025
It's really nice to see cognitive science applied by an actual teacher. Too many of the other books are stagnant and don't go beyond showing you how to best memorize a string of random numbers. In particular the 2nd half of the book is quite nice. I'd like to see more examples on psychology instruction even though I teach a different subject and more reflection on student thinking.
February 13, 2025
I got a lot of good ideas on structuring my classes to aid in retrieval and memory.
June 7, 2025
This book is super interesting. It was a quick read and I wish some parts had more detail.
July 10, 2025
An important read
The first part is an excellent explanation of memory and memory constraints. Cognitive load is explained and potential pitfalls are identified.
The first part is an excellent explanation of memory and memory constraints. Cognitive load is explained and potential pitfalls are identified.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews