Information Processing Theory and Approach

Are you aware of the intricate neuro-psychological process behind how your students (or just about anybody) acquires new concepts and knowledge? This is what the information processing theory seeks to explain. It dives into the intricate process of registering, observing and processing information within our brains and retrieving it when necessary.

Find out more about the theory and ways you can use it in the creation of online courses that help your students. Let's start with a brief look at where it all began.

Skip ahead:

•    A brief history of Information Processing Theory
•    Key concepts from Information Processing Theory
•    How does this all occur within the brain?
•    Students should focus on your online course content
•    Information processing basics that will help students to remember better.
•    The Limits of Information Processing Theory in online learning
•    Strategies for making more efficient the use of theory about information processing for online learning
•    Humanize information processing theory in order to develop online courses with a human touch

An overview of Information Processing Theory

Back in the 1950s, psychologists realized that computers held the most important clue to understanding how the human mind works. George Armitage Miller and Edward C. Tolman laid down the basics of how humans operate with short-term memory and learn things. Based on this fundamental model, two well-known models of theory on information processing eventually arose - The Atkinson and Shiffrin Model and the Baddeley and Hitch Model of Working Memory.

The Atkinson and Shiffrin Model discusses the different stages of information processing, comprising sensory memory, short term memory (working memory) and long term memory. It emphasizes the significance of attention as well as intricate rehearsal patterns that contribute to the storage of information in long-term memory. The Baddeley and Hitch Model of Working Memory is based on these concepts and explains how we process language and spatial patterns.

Do you have a lot of psychological terminology? Don't worry! We've merged aspects of all these theories to aid you in understanding the way we humans handle information. We can begin to understand this through examining the way that humans are able to process information in daily situations, and examining each of these steps in greater detail.

Key concepts from Information Processing Theory

As an educator of creators, it's extremely helpful to understand aspects of information processing.

Let's take one example

Suppose, you're walking on the streets that are crowded, and you are exposed to a variety of sights, sounds and smells. Some people may rub your shoulders in case you're unlucky to bump into large crowds. To escape this hustle and bustle, you decide to walk into a cafe that you know is calm and quiet. It is also a good idea to be aware that they offer top quality coffee and croissants in the section of town.

It's information processing theory at work, actually in the real world. Let's look at how:

1. It is possible to feel various stimulations (people walking around, someone brushing against your shoulder, or a vehicle moving at a high speed, etc. - sensation. A stimulus is an external input or information)
2. You perceive this place as crowded (perception is how we interpret the information we sensed).
3. Through your experiences in the past (long time episodic memory) You associate this situation to be unsafe and uncomfortable (being pushed around - previous association)
4. Hence, you recall a place that had previously given you solace (another chain of memory results in retrieving details about the tranquil cafe as well as its pastries - the semantic memory).
5. The memory is activated when you enter the cafe (judging/analyzing before making a final decision. Moving towards the cafe can be a an example of procedural memory).

    First, you sense your environment    

Humans are able to receive information called "stimulus" through the five senses: smell, touch, vision, auditory (hearing) and tasting. A sixth sense, which relates to the body's position, movement, and balancing the vestibular sense is present.

The sense organs, and their sense organs:

• Vision Eyes
• Audio - Ears
• Touch skin
• Taste - Tongue
• Smell - nose
• Vestibular sense: Ears as well as various other parts of the nervous system.

When your sense organs convert real-world information into electrical information, your brain processes them and interprets them as information which you recognize at a conscious level. The interpretation of what you see occurs due to previous associations (similar information that is stored in your brain that is able to recall and make connections).

Note for creators: Unless you incorporate augmented or virtual reality for your content for lessons, you will primarily use inputs (stimuli) related to vision (reading text and watching videos) as well as the audio (voice or background music).

    The process of perception is the result of sensing.

The sense organs detects stimulus from the outside and transforms the signals they receive into electrical signals that are recognized by various regions of the brain. Sensory processing takes place in the sense organs and perception is carried out inside the brain. People with different perceptual and disordered learning might find it difficult to absorb information efficiently.

For writers: If you're planning to make the content of your class disabled-friendly, you may want to look into accessible design methods. Examples of accessible design include avoiding uneven spacing of words and paragraphs that are long, breaking them into shorter paragraphs as well as ensuring adequate white space.

    The information that is perceived has been processed (encoded) and stored in memory.    

Memory is an umbrella term for many different aspects of cognitive functioning. It is the process of storing and storing the information for a period of time (sensory or working memory) and transferring it into longer-term storage via consolidation (encoding).

Sensory memory lasts between two and three seconds. If you don't pay attention to the experience and do not feel it, you will never become short-term memory. Researchers have found that the short-term memory holds approximately seven information items for a period between 15 and 30 seconds. With rehearsals, your mind can retain this information, after which it deteriorates or is lost.

During rehearsal, your brain is performing a process known as encode, which causes the information to transfer to long-term memory. Once transferred to long-term storage, you can retrieve the information at any time so long as you do not let it go through a process of decay or interruption. Memory that is long-term can range from recollecting what you saw in the past few minutes up to the events that occurred many years ago -- dating all the way back to childhood.

A note for the creators of your work: Rehearsal is usually performed as rote learning in pedagogical circumstances. We know that most students are not able to grasp the concept of rote-learning in nature, which is why it's not a good strategy to master complex concepts and abstract concepts.

The different kinds of memory that are long-term include:

1. The term "explicit memory" refers to that which is accessible to you consciously. If someone asks you what the capital city of Great Britain is, you will easily be able to declare it is London. Therefore, explicit memories are also called declarative memory. Declarative memory can further be subdivided into:

• The episodic memory - Memories of events or specific occasions which occurred in your life. For instance, visiting a friend's house in your childhood
• Semantic memory is the ability to recall things you've learned about the world. This includes the day of the declaration of World War 2 (September 1, 1939).

1. Implicit memory: It's kept in the long-term memory of your brain, but it is linked to your performance, movement. Examples include being able to swim, and recalling how to drive a car even after a lengthy gap etc.

    Attention makes memory last longer, and help you to learn faster    

Although our sense organs receive many kinds of information, they don't get registered within our brains unless we take note of the information. They just get stored as "sensory memory," following perception. They last only a few seconds (between two and three seconds).

Focusing here means focusing your awareness on a particular stimuli in the absence of other stimulus. For instance, you walk into the cafe that you like and decide to order the croissant you want in spite of the fact that there are numerous other items on the menu.

Reinvoking the example of the crowded street, your brain could have recognized the presence of different individuals. However, you may have not paid attention enough to recall their faces. As a result, the information related to their individual faces decayed, and then is gone forever.

What happens to it? happen inside the brain?

As an educator who creates, you might be wondering how the learning material you present to students gets being processed by their brains. Baddeley and the Hitch Model of Working Memory provides a clear answer to this.

They've explained that the frontal region (a part of our brain) is the brain's processing unit where data is stored and retrieved. Different types of memories are stored in various parts of the brain. According to Hitch:

• Audio information (information that is in the form of the sound that is usually recognized as music, language or different kinds of sounds) is recorded in the Phonological Loop.
• The Phonological Loop is a phonological store, where data is kept for a brief period of time, and the articulatory practice process is where the brain practices auditory information to be stored for a long period of time.
• Visuospatial sketch pad is the area of the brain which stores visual and spatial information like shapes, patterns and images.
• The episodic buffer may enhance the ability of the brain to encode, store and retrieve information by connecting diverse brain areas that aid in information processing.

We can now apply what we've learned about information processing in the online learning environment.

Your students should pay attention to your online course content

In the context of lesson planning or creating modules, think of it in this manner. If you don't present your slides or video appealing enough, students are likely to ignore them and go to the next one. The students look at the slide or video (sensation occurs) but do not perceive the content for long enough time to keep it in the short-term memory of their brains. Let them practice the skill to enter long term storage - it disappears completely from the sensorimotor memory. Therefore, keeping their attention is the most important thing.

It is important to consider the fact that your student may be daydreaming, distracted, or bored with the content you provide. Each of these things can affect the ability of students to pay attention to the information that needs to be learned and stored into long-term memory. Therefore, making sure you produce material that keeps your students' attention is very important.

  What you are able to do:  

• Urge them to take a break every ten to fifteen minutes. Human attention wane after fifteen minutes.
• So, plan your lessons to be broken down into segments of fifteen minutes or less. There is no need to create tutorials or videos that last just ten minutes. Instead, you need to give your students smaller activities, games or chillout sessions.
• Make online learning more interactive environments. We will explain why later on.

Basic information processing strategies to help your students remember better.

When information is saved in short-term memory, it can either be transferred to long-term memory or erased. Repeating and practicing is the key to keeping the information over a period of time in the long-term memory. Hence, it is crucial to plan your lessons so that your students get ample time to practice and then repeat the information that is retained inside their brains. The process should take place in a matter of the timeframe of a few minutes. So, at the conclusion of every lesson, which lasts a few minutes you should encourage students to repeat, practice in a rehearsal or practice. Rote learning helps ensure that what they have processed gets stored in long-term memory.

When something is saved in long-term memory, it can be retrieved later when prompted. But, the effectiveness of memory retrieval depends on the level of interest with which a pupil was able to absorb something (were sufficiently attentive or was the material you taught relevant enough, etc. ).

As you can see from this explanation that learning generally is a result of how we view information and how we associate it with our previous knowledge, and that we must pay attention.

Is it actually so simple?

Lesser-than-average limits of Information Processing Theory in online learning

Human beings aren't machines. While drawing parallels between the brain of a human and a computer can be tempting but they're different. Information Processing Theory doesn't discuss the role played by motivation and emotions in the way we process information and remember things. Both are vital for learning and remembering things we've learned.

It is believed that the brain processes information linearly -- that information is sensed, perceived and stored, processed (encoded), stored, and then recovered. This is known as serial processing. This is exactly what computers do.

But, the brain can be able to process information in parallel that means it can simultaneously process different kinds of information. Multitasking capabilities of the brain is not match what a computer can accomplish. Therefore, even though the theory of information processing accurately describes how we sense how we perceive, process and save information, it does not consider emotions and the non-linear manner that our brain works.

Students have emotions as well as desires and motives that you might or may not be aware of when designing the content of your class. Therefore, it's important to understand that you're providing instruction to human learners, not computers. One of the easiest ways to solve this issue is to develop an online learning environment that is stimulating.

Now, let's explore ways you can include motivation, emotion as well as social interaction to your mix, and make use of information processing theories even more in order to design the ideal online course.

Strategies to make information processing theory work better to facilitate online learning

    Encourage your students to be attentive    

How can someone be a student if they don't want to? It is essential that they have the determination or desire to enroll for the course and be motivated to finish.

Motivation drives them to be attentive to the course content, which can result in improved processing of information (encoding) and better ability to retrieve information. In other words, if your student isn't motivated to learn, even an outstanding course will not register in their mind.

Motivation plays a vital role in the processing of information as well. One needs to be motivated to pay attention to external stimuli.

• Your role as an creator educator is to maintain that motivation.
• Remember that motivation is a constant source of energy and is not a vacuum. It is essential to feel valued as well as receive constructive feedback and have a sense of social acceptance in order to feel motivated to keep doing something. Do you remember your peers who encouraged you to do something in times of low motivation or needed to be better in certain things? This applies to the process of learning too.

The interpersonal and motivational aspects have a lot in common. Now, let's explore how this plays out in the social information processing theory.

    Encourage social interaction during learning    

While one-to-one teaching is effective, humans benefit from learning when they are in a group. That's why learning in traditional settings always takes place in classrooms or groups because learning with others is much more fun (and more effective).

Social information processing Theory is a part of the explanation for how individuals communicate with each other on computer mediated platforms, such as an online platform for learning.

Humans also learn by modeling and observation. That means, imitating what others do. If you are, the creator educator, take on the role of model, and your pupils mimic your actions. Albert Bandura, a famous psychologist, emphasized that learning usually takes place in social settings, and that it is impossible to take away "social" from the process of learning.

With this in mind It is crucial to

• Create online group activities
• Encourage students to interact with each other on forums and to share their expertise.
• Make collaboration and engagement with social media a key part of your curriculum structure.
• Utilize social media tools for sharing ideas, and acts as a kind of rehearsal
• Get positive feedback from your peers (other students) which acts as a reinforcement. To do this, you should ask your students to evaluate each other's work positively.

    Utilize specific cognitive strategies for achieving goals    

Cognitive strategies are usually focused on a specific task. Therefore, you need to encourage your students to work in the area directly. The cognitive strategies that you can apply in online learning are notes-taking, repetition, context understanding, as well as Mnemonics. (A Mnemonic is a technique that helps you recall or access information stored in your memory)

For example: VIBGYOR can be an abbreviation used to describe the seven rainbow colors including violet, indigo blue, green, yellow, red and orange. Other than acronyms, there are many other kinds of mnemonics too like flashcards, classifying things into categories or categories, etc. All of them can help your pupils recall what they've learnt quickly.

    Facilitate high-level processing of information with metacognitive strategies    

Some researchers have also suggested the existence of something called "metacognition," which means "thinking about the thought process." When you practice as you practice and try to recollect your mistakes, or engage in techniques that actively help others to learn or remember (such such as educating to achieve a specific goal) it is engaging in a form of metacognition.

The year 1987 was the year that A.L. Brown began to discuss metacognition strategies in the context of learning. Through the years, it has developed somewhat.

In Online classes, here are some of the top metacognitive strategies

• Advance organizers: Help your students to consider the lesson plans you have prepared by sharing course calendars ahead of time. This helps your students to foresee what to expect and connect it with information they have already learned.
• Self-planning: Ask your students to plan their projects, as well as how they will structure them. It gives them the opportunity to "think about the things they're learning" - metacognition.
• Self-monitoring: Student self-rating scales are an excellent way to understand where your students need help. Make online forms that allow students monitor their progress at the conclusion of each lesson/week, as per the schedule you prefer.
• Self-evaluation can be done periodically or even at the conclusion of the course. Because online courses are mainly taken up by self-motivated individuals It is crucial that they get outcomes.

Apart from self-evaluation you could also use associations to help students learn and remember what they learn. In order to make this method more efficient, it is essential to be aware of what your students are aware of. So,

• Before you enroll someone in an educational program, evaluate the level of their knowledge in order to determine if they're a good candidate for the course.
• If they are not, and you are launching the course to help beginners, make sure that you develop your material in a way that students can connect what you teach to something they already know. That means that you need assist them with the encoding process.

You may need to employ methods such as images, chunking, or elaborate.

• Break your modules into smaller pieces, and use engaging polls and online debates. You can also use Q&As, and peer support to keep your students engaged.
• Help your students form relationships with their prior knowledge by providing information in a way that is easy to visualize. This will help students use images to help students learn and retain information.
• Additionally, the online course will require the students to take the course actively. The process of elaboration, sometimes referred to as elaboration is vital to engage students and form associations with existing skills to acquire new knowledge.

While these are all metacognitive and cognitive techniques, they cannot be ignored the importance of emotions, motivation as well as social learning theories.

    Include social interactions and emotional expression into the mix    

A majority of your students enroll in your course because they cannot physically attend classes for different reasons. Learning environments online can be a viable alternative to face-to-face learning and provide better involvement in a lot of cases. However, it is essential to keep your learning online environment vibrant and exciting. It is essential to employ techniques that are socially-affective, and involve the interpersonal interaction and emotional reactions. Note that "affect" means feelings.

Here's how to accomplish this:

• Be relatable for your students to learn through modelling. Create feelings of wonder and excitement. You can also create feelings of satisfaction, contentment, joy, excitement, surprise, etc. It's fairly easy to create these types of emotions among your students.
• Gamification can help your students feel happy and satisfied as they complete some levels of achievement.
• The giving of badges, certificates, or other forms positive reinforcement could aid in the development of joy.
• If you provide the chance to discount a well-performing student You combine excitement with surprise, which makes learners more enthusiastic to continue learning.
• Polling can be used to make games and tests at the end of every fifteen minutes in order to ensure that your students are engaged and allow them to talk about what they have learned through forums.
• As youngsters are more familiar to social media It makes sense to incorporate social media in the classroom as well.

Humanize the theory of information processing to make online courses that are relatable

Information processing theory helps us to understand how we store and acquire new knowledge within our brains, by using our sense organs and the brain. Although this model is accurate regarding how perception and perception operate, it fails to provide a complete explanation of social learning or the role of motivation as well as emotions.

Additionally, the human mind is very complex and cannot be reduced to how the computers function. Being creator educators, it is crucial to keep your students' innate thoughts and desires in their minds. Through creating a stimulating online learning experience and taking into consideration human limitations, you can make a great online course that will leave a lasting impression on the pupils.

gives you various tools to create course content which is social and engaging. It allows you to create course content rooted in information processing techniques, yet acknowledges that your students are thinking and feeling human beings, who like to interact with one another while learning. It offers powerful social engagement tools that make it simple to develop classes for groups and promote lively discussions among your students.

By humanizing online learning, allows you to connect with your students and in a way that is engaging. If you want to know more about how could help you develop course modules rooted in psychological science, contact us today.