How learning works and how it impacts our revision

To truly understand what learning is, we also need to understand memory. The memory has three parts to it – short-term; working; and long-term.

Before, I alluded to our long-term memory. This is the section of our brain that can remember information for a very long time, and will include things like a postal address and phone numbers. It will also include lots of information that we have learned at university, too.

Therefore, learning is when we can repeat a process or recall information for a very long time and can safely say the information is in our long-term memory. However, there will be lots of information that would have been in our long-term memory (for example, our very first phone number) that we are now no longer able to remember. It’s important to remember that (pardon the pun).

Our short-term memory is exactly that, short-term. This part of the brain is able to hold on to new information for a very short period of time, before it just gets forgotten.

Sometimes this can be seconds, or sometimes a few minutes. But unless we use that information, it will be forgotten pretty quickly.

Our working memory is, in effect, where our short-term memory and our long-term memory come together. For this explanation, I want to use the analogy of a work bench in a shed.

Imagine on the bench you have a pencil and ruler – two pieces of equipment that you have been shown how to use before, and have practised very many times. How to use these pieces of equipment is in your long-term memory.

Now imagine you had just been shown how to measure out a piece of wood (done before, you know how to use a pencil and ruler), but now you were shown how to use a saw in order to chop the wood. The use of the saw is a new piece of information, which enters in your short-term memory.

Now, if you did nothing with that information, you would very quickly forget how to use the saw. However, what we do now on our workbench (our working memory) is practise using the saw in the same way that we have just been shown. We practise and practise and practise, until we are sawing the wood correctly every single time.

For now, we could say that we have performed. We have shown we can repeat the new skill; we could even put that into our long-term memory (the saw can be left in the tool shed).

This is where memory gets a little tricky. If we don’t keep practising with that saw, then we will forget how to use it. We need to keep getting that saw out of our tool shed, bringing it to our workbench and keep practising with it.

Each time we go to get the saw, our first few goes may be a little inaccurate or inefficient. However, the more times we get the saw, the better we will be with it, until eventually, whenever we pick it up, we can cut a piece of wood accurately first time, with no issues. We have now definitely learned that new skill.

The process of bringing something from our long-term memory to our working memory (a tool from our shed to our workbench) is the act of remembering, or, in education terms, recall. If we want to learn something, we need to keep recalling it – we need to keep being forced to remember it and use it. The more we use it, the more likely we are to remember it.

This is exactly the reason why, at the time, you could remember your first ever phone number, but now you can’t. When you had that phone, you would be recalling that phone number all the time, but now you haven’t for years, so that information has just drifted away. You failed to recall it, and so now it is gone.

This process of recall also helps us to develop something called our schema. This is a very fancy way of saying that remembering information in different contexts supports our ability to remember that information.

For example, if we recall information of how to use a pencil and ruler when we saw wood, but also when we measure out tiles, and also when we draw a floor plan and so forth, we are going to more accurately remember how we use these pieces of equipment.

It’s the same at university. The more times we recall a piece of information, and in different contexts, the more likely we are to remember it.

We need a summary here. When we are told information, it lives, albeit very briefly, in our short-term memory. We need to use that information instantly in our working memory (we call this attending to the information, because we are doing something with it).

Typically, we want to try to link this new information with information from our long-term memory (as this helps us both prevent forgetting other information and helps us to remember this new information).

The consequence for us in our learning is clear. We need to constantly test that we can remember information (so don’t wait until fourth year to try to remember information from first year, because if it hasn’t been used in the interim, it will have been forgotten, and you will need to re-learn it).

We also need to make sure that we link new information with our long-term memory, and constantly attend to it. Where we don’t, we will just forget it.