LE3

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Welcome to Learning Event 3 🎯

Breaking It Down 🌟

Learning Event 3 focuses on chunking course content—breaking it into smaller, digestible pieces. This technique helps instructors stay focused on essential material and allows students to better comprehend, learn, and retain information.

Why Chunking Matters

Chunking involves dividing complex information into smaller, manageable units. It leverages short-term memory by grouping related content into meaningful chunks, improving comprehension and retrieval.

The Memory Process:

  1. Sensory Memory: Captures sensory inputs but filters out most data.
  2. Working Memory: Temporarily holds active thoughts but has limited capacity.
  3. Long-Term Memory: Stores encoded information in mental frameworks called schemas.

Origin of Chunking:

Introduced by George A. Miller in 1956, chunking addresses the bottleneck in working memory, which can hold only 4–8 items at a time.

When working memory becomes overwhelmed, learners experience cognitive overload, leading to loss of information. Chunking reduces this risk by presenting content in structured, bite-sized pieces.

READ 📖

  1. Does This Course Make My Content Look Big? – Liz Crowell & Andrea Stone
    “By focusing attention on organized modules, you cover all the content in a logical, natural progression.”

  2. Content Chunking: The Basis To An Engaging And Well-Designed Course – eLearning Industry
    “Content that is not chunked overwhelms learners and leads to cognitive overload.”

  3. How to Chunk Training Materials – Convergence Training
    “Novices can work with four small chunks. Experts can manage four larger chunks.”

WATCH 🎥

  1. Chunking: Learning Technique for Better Memory (3:32)
  2. Organizing Content Overview: Chunking Content (6:10)
  3. Why Chunking Content Is Important (2:10)

DISCUSS 💬

How can we organize course content to scaffold learners while building long-term retention?

DO ✍️

Examine, review, and revise the activities and assessments in your course(s) to apply chunking strategies effectively.

Self-Check:

Four stages to chunking information:

  1. Start at the top:
    Identify the most important content and use it to create course modules. Learn how to organize content.

  2. Divide modules into lessons:
    Break down modules into smaller, related lessons.

  3. Chunk at the screen level:
    Present only one piece of information per screen for clarity.

  4. Check yourself:

    • Is the information "need-to-know" rather than "nice-to-know"?
    • Do visuals reduce cognitive load?

Share Your Work!

We’d love to hear how you implemented this Learning Event! Email us at hello@digitallyliterate.net.