To understand the challenges that teachers face we need to understand how we all take in information from the environment, process it, and store it in our memories. Our processing systems include two important memory stores: working memory, which is the portion of our memory in which conscious processing of information occurs. And long term memory, which is our permanent memory store.
Working memory is our consciousness; it is the workbench or working space than we use to consider information from the environment and solve problems.
An important aspect of our processing system is that working memory is limited in capacity. This limitation means that we are able to consciously process only a certain amount of information, and if we attempt to cope with too much information at a time, some will be lost or ignored in an effort to simplify the amount we have to process.
This problem is common in schools with students who have not mastered, for example, basic operations in math, or skills in reading. When required to solve a math word problem, too much of the working memory’s limited capacity is required to simply read the problem or perform the basic mathematical operations, leaving an inadequate amount of thinking space to figure out the more sophisticated aspects of the problem. As a result, students can’t solve the problem