The Theory of information processing helps us to understand how children learn.
There are 3 stages:
- Attention: This links to our focus and motivation to learn. Pupils are bombarded with new information from our environment and surroundings, as well as the content they must learn. This is an immediate effect and if pupils are not able to focus on a particular item, they will not be able to move it to their working memory, and then long term memory.
- Working memory: Once pupils have selected the piece of information they want to focus on it is processed into our working memory. Information will last in the working memory for between 10-30 seconds before it is either lost or transferred to our long term memory.
- Long term memory: Information is passed to the long term memory, known as encoding. In passing it to the long term memory store pupils begin to build links and schemas which helps them to retain information and retrieve it when needed.