steve cooley presents

How many variables can humans process?: “David Pescovitz:
In a new study, cognitive scientists show that humans can usually track just four mental variables when trying to solve a problem. In the journal Psychological Science, cognitive scientists from the University of Queensland and Griffith University report on a study where they tested these limits of processing capacity. It’s tough to measure because people commonly break down complex problems into manageable chunks. For example, a baker doesn’t have to think: ‘break egg one into bowl, break egg two into bowl, etc.’ Instead, he’ll track it as one chunk: ‘add all the eggs.’ To measure their test subjects, the researchers devised problems involving statistical interactions between fictitious variables. The details of the test are vague, but apparently the problems couldn’t immediately be broken into ‘bite-size chunks.’ From the press release:

The researchers found that, as the problems got more complex, participants performed less well and were less confident. They were significantly less able to accurately solve the problems involving four-way interactions than the ones involving three-way interactions, and they were (not surprisingly) less confident of their solutions. And five-way interactions? Forget it. Their performance was no better than chance.

After the four- and five-way interactions, participants said things like, ‘I kept losing information,’ and ‘I just lost track.’

Link“

(Via Boing Boing.)

Ok, so it seems like the best way to build lessons is to reverse the equation here. If we know we can only keep track of 4 unique unfamiliar variables in a system, base learning around this.

To make a cake:

lesson 1. overview

* gather ingredients and tools
* mix ingredients together
* bake in an oven
* frosting the cake.

Lesson 2. gathering ingredients

* dry cake ingredients
* wet cake ingredients
* fillings
* frostings

Lesson 3. mixing ingredients

* set up tools
* add wet ingredients
* add dry ingredients
* establish length of time of mixing - don't over mix

Lesson 4. bake in an oven

* grease baking pans
* preheat oven
* pour half of mix into each
* bake until an inserted toothpick comes out dry

lesson 5. frosting

* cut the cake for layers
* slap on the filling 
* reassemble the cake layers
* slather on the outer frosting

Ok, this is probably an oversimplification… or is it? You can drill down any number of levels deeper for more granular teaching, but it seems to work ok if you need to teach the basic concepts of this cake baking process. Does a four step per lesson pattern work for other processes? Deeje, take a crack at breaking down programming in c++ or ObjC for me like this? Four steps per lesson, I can handle that. We have scientific proof now.

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