When did ‘Working Memory’ become a thing? The reason I ask is that despite having studied Psychology as part of my first degree, more so on my teacher training course, and even more so as part of my MA, 'Working Memory’ was only mentioned in passing — if at all.

Moreover, as I mentioned in my recent review of The Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, in that book the term ‘working memory’ is noticeable by its absence.

Now, I have to make a few prefaratory remarks before saying any more.

Firstly, I completely agree with the observation by George Box that all models are wrong, but some are useful.

I ought to know: my original subject was Economics, and all of its models were wrong with just one or two exceptions. The one closest to describing reality was also the most useless because it was so complex that it couldn’t be used to predict anything! So I think that if you find the concept of ‘Working Memory’ useful, then use it (I don’t). My objection is more about the way it seems to have been fetishised to become a real, measurable, concept that gets wheeled out in such a way as to have no practical value at all. (More on this in a moment.)

The second thing I want to say is that although I enjoy having visions, my main focus is on practical application. Whenever I’m listening to someone waxing lyrical on a podcast or in their conference keynote session about some imagined future education version of Shangri La, I find myself wondering:

How will this help me when I teach Year 11 on a windy Friday afternoon?

I recognise, however, that I may be in the position that Keynes describes, in the context of economic policy:

Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

However, my position is that I think the idea of ‘working memory’ is misapplied and, in any case, unnecessary, and I remain unconvinced by ‘cognitive load theory’. Nothing I’ve read has convinced me otherwise.

To take what I wrote earlier about a measurable concept. The way ‘working memory’ is measured is, usually, by presenting the subject with a string of random items, or nonsense words — a bit like one of the aspects of the game show The Price is Right, but even less exciting and even more pointless.

Because, quite frankly, any teacher who presents their class with a bunch of random items unrelated to anything really ought to consider a different career. Any half decent teacher tasked with introducing students to new concepts will try to discern what they already know in order to find points of reference. I have always liked the idea of advance organisers posited by Ausubel (there’s a reference in that link), which entails relating new material to what a student already knows. I’ve also thought of this as ‘hooks’: it’s much easier for someone to learn something if they have something they can hook the new stuff onto.

Looked at in this way, the supposed limit to the amount of new information that someone can hold in their head is expanded if, in effect, the new material is grafted on to the students’ long-term memory. At least, that’s how it seems to me. If I’m right, then I don’t see how you can accurately measure ‘working memory’ anyway.

As for practicalities, I was listening to a podcast recently in which one of the panelists stated that in your average class the students’ ‘working memory’ will vary between four and seven items. That sounds like it might mean something, but it bears a surprising similarity to a footnote in Lifemanship, by Stephen Potter.

Just to give you some background in order to give the excerpt that follows some meaning, Potter wrote several books on what he called ‘one-upmanship’, the philosophy of which (if I may use so dignified a term) is: if you’re not one up, then you’re one down. The idea is to make the other person feel awkward, that something indefinable has gone awry. These books were Gamesmanship, Lifemanship, One-Upmanship and Supermanship.

Potter invented an institution called the Lifemanship Correspondence College, through which people can learn the principles and practice of one-upmanship. The graduates of this august place of learning are known as ‘Lifemen’. (Bear in mind that these books were written in the 1940s and 1950s.)

With that in mind, look at this footnote, which appears on page 2 of Lifemanship:

According to Hulton Research, the number of lifemen who drink tea but never buy fireworks is 79 (correct for income group B up to June 1946). The figure for those who are interested in soap substitutes and have not yet been to Portugal is, however, 385.

Even if this is citing actual research, what is one supposed to do with this information? It’s useless, meaningless, and completely inapplicable to any conceivable situation. (Indeed, this was one of the ways in which Potter gently poked fun at academia; he was a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Oxford.) That’s how I feel about the statement that the average ‘working memory’ in a class is between four and seven items.

What age group? What subject? What are you supposed to do? You can’t say “Hands up all those with a working memory of four items” or “All those with a working memory of four items sit on that table at the back of the room.”! Should you err on the side of caution and reduce the number of new things you present to the class in any one lesson to the bare minimum? And what would that bare minimum be? Wouldn’t that vary from subject to subject and even from topic to topic within a subject?

Besides, that statement about four to seven items is (I presume) a general finding. If you really want to be sure of doing the right thing you ought to measure the ‘working memory’ of your students. Just make sure you don’t do so when it’s windy, or you’ll probably obtain bizarre results.

As soon as you try to make sense of all this in any practical way it collapses like a pack of cards. It’s all hideously complicated, needlessly so. Introducing new concepts to a class is, at least in theory, pretty straightforward:

1. Find out what they already know.

2. Decide what is the minimal viable new information to introduce in the lesson.

3. Introduce the new material in a way that enables the students to relate it to what they already know.

Here’s a simple example about how I’ve introduced students to the idea of conditionals. In a spreadsheet, the function:

=IF(x,y,z)

means IF x is true, then y, otherwise z.

I guarantee that this will prove meaningless to many, probably most, students the first time they encounter it if all the teacher does is stick it on the whiteboard and say “Look at that”. Much better to relate it to an everyday situation:

If it is raining, I’ll take an umbrella, otherwise I won’t.

The state of the weather is x, taking an umbrella is y, and not taking an umbrella is z.

Job done, and no need to seek support from some theory or other that cannot easily, or confidently, be applied to a real classroom situation.