Memory & meaning: Meaning is key to learning. Meaningless material is difficult to remember. Meaningful material is remembered much easier (Baddeley 1982, Gathercole & Baddeley 1993). One reason for this is that meaningful material ‘chunks’. The fact that so much more could be assimilated in condition three (BILLY HAD FIVE OTHER HATS) rather than condition one (BILER HAR FEM HJULER IALT) in the example above illustrates ‘chunking’. We have an embarrassingly small, and very transient, short term memory. This memory will only hold around 7 ‘items’, and only for about one second (Baddeley 1982). Without continual rehearsing these items will disappear from this memory very fast. You will have seen people madly muttering a telephone number over and over as they frantically search for something to write it down with, and on. They know that if they stop repeating this number, even for a moment, it will be gone. This is because it is simply a list of disconnected items; it has no inherent ‘meaning’; it does not ‘chunk’.

But what is an ‘item’? An item, in this context, is something which is manageable by memory as a single, independent, identifiable and particular thing. It has meaning. Chunking is the agglomeration of several meaningless items, which we would otherwise have to manage one by one, into meaningful chunks, making fewer, but larger and meaningful, items. Letters, for example, are exactly such detailed items, meaningless in themselves, while words are letters chunked into larger, but meaning-bearing, items. Chunking enables several details (each of which is a whole item, if considered in meaningless isolation) to be considered and managed as a single, now meaningful, item. Clearly we experience greatly improved cognitive management of items when they are fewer, but meaningful. If asked to memorise the letters CTLRYAEI you have a problem. It is an eight item list, as presented. It is meaningless and hence inherently unmemorable. Even if you were to set to and learn this list of items you will almost certainly have forgotten most of it by tomorrow. Write the same list of letters as LITERACY, though, and you have no recall problem whatsoever. In this second condition you ‘see’ only a single item which has meaning for you. In a decade from now you will still recall every letter accurately. You were able to achieve this stunning improvement in cognitive performance by chunking those eight meaningless items into one meaningful one.

An experiment (Gathercole & Baddeley 1993) elegantly demonstrates the effect of chunking, organisation, categorisation and meaning. People (probably long-suffering students) were divided into two groups and each person given 100 cards. On each card a single item was written. (e.g. lion, chair, dog, eye, soccer, elbow, doctor, tennis, dentist, rugby, ear, golf, pig, teacher, hockey, table, politician, elephant, farmer, knee, bed, foot, cow, sofa …) Group one was given just five minutes to memorise the items. Group two was given just five minutes to sort them into categories. After five minutes both groups surrendered their cards and were then asked to write down as many items as they could recall. Group two, as you will have guessed, performs far better than group one, despite having had no intention to memorise the items and no idea that they might be expected to do this. Group two has, of course, simply ‘chunked’ their items into categories, has organised a mass of bits of meaningless information into meaningful ‘chunks’. Five categories are easily remembered. Within such a meaningful framework many ‘items’ fall naturally into recall. Spending time organising the information proved to be the best strategy for getting cognitively on top of it. Group one, of course, had insufficient time to think about organizing their material, so were reduced to trying to remember a plethora of items of very little meaning and with small relation to one another. This sort of thing is extremely difficult to do, especially under pressure.

Becoming able to ‘see’ words and patterns whole, rather than flailing about among individual letters, is chunking. Our minds obviously appreciate the amalgamation of meaningless details into meaningful chunks. Bringing our own previous knowledge and intelligent expectations to text very powerfully promotes this process of finding meaningful chunks. The more we can induce appropriate chunking, the more user-friendly literacy will become. The fewer, and more meaningful, chunks we can divine the better. Demanding absolute rectitude in detail does the opposite. Such an approach causes students to fixate on detail and become anxious about performance. Literacy will become disempowering and intimidating, rather than something we just do. Fostering confidence will take us further than demanding precision, even if this means overlooking a little inaccuracy and a peccadillo or two on the way. Loudly noticing every single spelling mistake in angry red pencil, for example, inevitably prioritises detail over meaning. Insisting that every word be read exactly as written - not accepting a reasonable synonym for example - will do the same. Relaxing our grip on detail, paradoxically, may increase our grasp of it. It will also improve confidence, an error-reducing strategy par excellence. We will look at this outrageous idea again, later in this chapter and later in the book.