Introduction: There are many different styles of learning. Three of these styles are most commonly used in school settings: auditory, visual, and a combination of the two. Auditory learners are typically good listeners who are able to pick things up when they hear them and benefit from hearing lectures, brainstorming, and participating in discussions. They are great at listening and picking up on the tone/inflection in which things are said, hearing what others simply may not. Many times, these are participants who talk through projects with you and want/need verbal input. They think best when they’re speaking and can typically follow directions when spoken out loud.
Written information may not help them, so they may read it outloud to ‘take in all the information’ (Weichel, 2016). Visual learners have a sharp eye and are “taking it all in.” Observation and note-taking are their strengths; however, those notes may be in pictures, diagrams, or words, depending on what they prefer. They may place themselves in the room so they can focus and avoid distractions when trying to learn. They benefit from visualization exercises, watching videos, written instructions, maps, diagrams, silent reading, and flowcharts. Many enjoy reading and are able to process the words and recall what they have seen (Weichel, 2016). Short-term memory is the second stage of the multi-store memory model proposed by the Atkinson-Shiffrin (McLeod, 2009).
It acts as a kind of “scratch-pad” for provisional recall of the information which is being processed at any given time (Mastin, 2018). Short-term memory has three key-aspects: limited capacity, limited duration, and encoding. For limited capacity, only about seven items can be stored at a time. The magic number seven (plus or minus two) provides evidence for the capacity of short term memory. Most adults can keep five to nine items in their short-term memory. This idea was put forward by Miller (1956) and he called it ‘the magic number seven’.
He thought that short term memory could hold seven (plus or minus two) items because it had only a certain number of “slots” in which those items could be stored. However, Miller didn’t identify the exact amount of information that can be confined in each slot. Also, if we can “chunk” data together we can store a lot more information in our short-term memory (McLeod, 2009).
For a limited time, storage is very fragile and information can be lost with distractions or passages of time. It is usually assumed that the short-term memory unpremeditatedly disappears over time, typically in ten to fifteen seconds, but items may be preserved for up to a minute, depending on the content (Mastin, 2018). Items can be kept in short-term memory longer by repeating them out loud (acoustic encoding), a process known as rehearsal.
