Chunking

WHY? - Information Processing Theory (IPT)

George A. Miller has provided two theoretical ideas that are fundamental to cognitive psychology and the information processing framework. Information processing theory (IPT) has become a general theory of human cognition; the phenomenon of chunking has been verified at all levels of cognitive processing.

The first concept in the IPT is "chunking" and the capacity of short term (working) memory (or attention span). Miller (1956) presented the idea that short-term memory could only hold 5-9 chunks of information (seven plus or minus two) where a chunk is any meaningful unit. A chunk could refer to digits, words, chess positions, or people's faces. The concept of chunking and the limited capacity of short term memory became a basic element of all subsequent theories of memory.

References:
Miller, G.A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81-97.
http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html
http://tip.psychology.org/miller.html
www.istheory.yorku.ca/informationprocessingtheory.htm

From theory to the technicalities of chunking in HotPotatoes

Sometimes there's a long text that needs to be divided into smaller chunks, the students takling the chunks one at a time rather than struggling with the whole text. We are also limited by the screen size and the amount of text that a HotPotatoes exercise can display without the learner having to scroll up and down jumping from text to question/answer, (allow to) open new tabs or pop-up windows. There are several ways of chunking in HotPotatoes. Read on.

Related Tutorials

• Virtual pagination: Chunking
• Accordion: Chunking

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