Reading notes from “Why Don’t Students Like School?”

Reading notes from Why Don’t Students Like School?:

• Successful thinking relies on four factors: information from the environment, facts in long-term memory, procedures in long-term memory, and the amount of space in working memory. If any one of these factors is inadequate, thinking will likely fail.
• Thinking is combining information in new ways.
• Four ways that background knowledge is important to reading comprehension:
  1. it provides vocabulary;
  2. it allows you to bridge logical gaps that writers leave;
  3. it allows chunking, which increases room in working memory and thereby makes it easier to tie ideas together; and
  4. it guides the interpretation of ambiguous sentences.
• Memory is the residue of thought.
• Things can’t get into long-term memory unless they have first been in working memory. So this is a somewhat complex way of explaining the familiar phenomenon: If you don’t pay attention to something, you can’t learn it!