Have you ever felt this way in dental school? That sense of doom, desperation and angst from the insurmountable tasks that need to be accomplished to meet your goals. If you need to pass each year, you must prioritize, process, and succeed in memorizing thousands of pages and images and most of all….. REMEMBER all of it! Then comes the actual “practicing” in real life!
How does your brain do this? Where in your body is this “being” that is watching and directing all this action….Is this the homunculus- the tiny human inside your brain that was once thought to be the master of your thoughts? Who or what is controlling your thoughts and actions? THAT is the “Working Memory”, coined by Miller, Galanter and Pribram in 1960 who compared the brain to a computer. Many decades later, now that we are very familiar with the workings of a computer, we can appreciate how our brain really works. Though many theories on memory have been researched, Baddeley’s Working Memory Model has the attributes that could explain this process that is very analogous to a computer. It has 4 components: Central Executive component integrates and coordinates information and decides if it is relevant and either uses it immediately or stores it in long-term memory for future retrieval. Phonological loop stores phonological information and helps rehearsal (like remembering a phone number to dial), the visual-spatial sketchpad that stores visual and spatial information, creating mental maps and making associations, the episodic buffer that integrates phonological , visual, spatial and semantic information, and connects to the long-term memory. Working Memory is limited in its capacity and can only hold 7 “chunks” of information. Practice and repetition can only improve the retrieval time but cannot increase the working memory capacity. It increases from infancy to adulthood and declines as we get older. It is responsible for self-regulation of emotions and learning and is an important indicator of academic success, even more than intelligence. If this is so complicated for normal adults, what about our students with ADHD or Dyslexia? Research shows that the Working Memory deficits are very common in such individuals. In a study by Mary Alt et al, a comparison of the different components of the Baddeley’s model was tested between children with dyslexia and children with normal development. Results show the Phonological Loop as well as Central Executive component deficits in children with dyslexia. What can you do as a dental educator to be inclusive in your classroom?
Be the boss of your own thoughts....
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Dr. Parvati IyerI am a passionate, inquisitive dental educator, striving for excellence. My goal is to be inclusive in the classroom, incorporate multimodal teaching and learning strategies to increase active learning Relevant Research
|