Old mothers who help their children with their homework probably have such a painful experience:
Why is life so different? ! Cognitive scientists say that children's reading difficulty is most likely a problem in the memory area of the brain. I can't stand it, I can't see it deeply, I can't see through it, because the child has a poor memory! Understanding the working principle of brain memory can fundamentally improve children's reading comprehension ability.
0 1.
The development degree of brain memory area determines children's reading comprehension level.
The working principle of brain memory is complicated and can be simply divided into working memory and long-term memory.
For most of us, long-term memory is a familiar term: the primary school deskmate is called Wei Xiaobao; H2O is the molecular formula of water; "Memory" means "memory" in English; Wait, the information and knowledge stored in our brains for a long time is long-term memory.
But working memory is a relatively unfamiliar concept. Cognitive scientists have found that when thinking, the brain needs a specific area to process information. The capacity of this area is limited, and only 7 or 2 messages can be put at a time. Each message can only be stored for about 20 seconds and will be forgotten. This is working memory. The brain processes the limited information in working memory, or makes decisions, or produces information that can be stored in long-term memory, or in vain, and all information is emptied.
! ! ! Knock on the blackboard! ! !
Reading comprehension is essentially a kind of thinking.
Thinking depends on the memory area of the brain.
The extent to which the memory area of the brain is developed and utilized determines the level of children's reading comprehension.
Let's look at how working memory and long-term memory work when reading.
Let's look at what reading comprehension is. To put it simply, reading comprehension first means understanding the meaning of words, including knowing every word and understanding the literal meaning of every sentence; The second is to integrate words with the information and knowledge they have mastered, think about the deep meaning of words, and produce new experiences and cognition.
Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of cognitive psychology at Nina University in the United States, explained the simplified cognitive learning process in Why Students Don't Like School, which can be perfectly applied to reading comprehension:
As can be seen from this flowchart, effective reading comprehension is divided into five steps:
Obviously, reading comprehension can only happen in the working memory area. Whether children can read depends on working memory, and the depth of understanding depends on the background knowledge and information in long-term memory area.
02.
Children with weak reading ability have too little working memory capacity.
As can be seen from the above process, working memory is the motor of reading comprehension, and the information read can only be truly understood after processing here. Working memory has two functions: short-term storage of information and information processing. The ability of working memory to store information is called capacity, and information processing ability is also thinking ability.
The capacity of working memory is limited. At present, it is recognized that the capacity of working memory is seven plus two, which is the famous "7 2 rule" of working memory.
Working memory is like a juggler throwing a juggling stick in a circus. They throw juggling sticks (that is, information items) into the air, throw them up and catch them in turn. But working memory, a juggler, can only throw 7 juggling sticks at the same time. If there are too many, I can't catch them. It is for this reason that we can work out 12 ×23 in our minds with a little training, but we can't work out1234× 3456 with any training-jugglers have too many sticks to catch.
Because working memory also needs information processing, at this time, the capacity of working memory will change with the difficulty of information processing. The higher the intensity of information processing, the smaller the capacity of working memory. This is easy to understand. If the juggler is allowed to perform magic while throwing a stick, the more complicated the magic is, the less sticks the juggler can throw.
An experiment in Nankai University revealed another little secret-when researchers studied the relationship between reading comprehension and working memory of junior and senior high school students, they found that the capacity of working memory of students with weak reading comprehension ability was obviously smaller than that of students with strong reading comprehension ability. When the reading intensity increases, that is, when information processing needs to consume more working memory, the working memory capacity of all students will decrease, but the students with weak reading ability will decrease more-the original capacity is smaller than others, and the capacity will shrink faster than others when the writing difficulty increases.
This discovery is also in line with our common sense. There is little difference between students in learning easy texts, and the more difficult the texts, the greater the difference.
03.
Skillful use of two cognitive skills can "expand" working memory.
According to the current research results, cognitive scientists believe that it is difficult to break through and improve the physiological limit of 7 2 capacity of working memory, but rich background knowledge can break through the physiological limit of working memory and expand working memory.
First of all, the capacity of working memory is not calculated in bytes. The juggler in the working memory area has an advantage: it can not only throw a juggling stick as small as a letter and a number, but also throw a juggling stick as big as a sentence, a book and a whole set of theories. Besides, it can really do magic. It can "process" several juggling sticks into a big juggling stick, so that several new juggling sticks can be connected.
Take chestnut as an example, the ID number is *** 18, which makes it difficult for you to remember the ID number of a stranger, but if this stranger happens to be your hometown and you are in Amanome, it is easy for you to remember his ID number. Because you only need to remember the last four digits, the first six digits represent provinces, cities and districts, and the birthday dates of the last eight digits, like your own ID card, have already existed in your long-term memory (please go away if you can't remember the ID number).
The stranger's ID number is equivalent to 18 juggling sticks, which far exceeds the working memory capacity. And this special stranger's ID number, after a slight treatment of working memory, has become four juggling sticks (the last four), leaving more room for thinking for working memory.
This method is called "chunk" in cognitive science, that is, the scattered information is related as much as possible to form a huge and complete information. Chunks rely on background knowledge from long-term memory. If you don't have your own ID number in long-term memory, you can't chunk the ID number of this special stranger.
In addition, people who can drive should remember their driving experience. At first, I was so absorbed in the steering wheel that I didn't even have the energy to look at the dashboard. I still can't walk straight. Every now and then, I either lose my temper or hit a tree. On the one hand, this is a problem of hand, foot and eye coordination, on the other hand, it is caused by the limitation of working memory-there are too many items to be manipulated in driving, which exceeds the 7 2 capacity of working memory, so it is inevitable to lose sight of one thing and lose sight of another.
After getting familiar with work, chatting, listening to the radio and watching the scenery outside the car will not affect driving at all-driving has become an automatic function that can be completed subconsciously, and it hardly consumes working memory.
This is the second way to expand working memory: automatic.
When a child starts reading, especially when learning to read in Pinyin, you may notice a phenomenon: the child spells every word of a sentence accurately, and then you ask him what this sentence means, and he will look blank and spell it later. This is the problem of working memory capacity: when the sentence is a little long, spelling a word will overload the child's working memory, and the words behind it have been forgotten, let alone the meaning of the sentence. This is one of the common phenomena that children can't understand in reading.
After repeated practice, when children can recognize every word at a glance, and the process of "grouping words" is automated, and they consume less or even no working memory, children can save more working memory areas to understand words.
04.
If children want to read deeply, it is most important to remember long-term memory.
The "expansion" of working memory requires background knowledge. So where is the background knowledge? In long-term memory, of course.
Basic reading includes: word recognition, syntactic analysis, text relevance, and association with learned knowledge. These all need to call the background knowledge stored in the long-term memory of the brain.
If there is not enough background knowledge in long-term memory, a large number of new words, or complex sentence structure and logical relationship are not mastered, and there are too many unknown or unskilled knowledge points, it seems that the motor of working memory will not work.
On the other hand, only when the content of reading can be organically linked with background knowledge can children gain new knowledge from reading, and the new knowledge can enter long-term memory, adding fuel to long-term memory. Otherwise, if reading is out of touch with background knowledge, children will either not understand it, or understand it, but forget it as soon as they turn around.
Reading the same book, the richer the relevant background knowledge, the faster you read, the more you know, the deeper you think and the longer you remember-the richer the knowledge, the higher the efficiency of accumulating new knowledge. Similarly, in the same classroom, listening to the same teacher, the more children read, the more they learn. On the contrary, the less children read, the less they learn.
05.
Four ways to improve children's reading ability by using brain memory area
What's the use of talking so many theories to children? In fact, as long as we master the relationship between reading and memory, we can sum up some ways to help children improve their reading ability.
1
Increase vocabulary, control reading difficulty and reduce working memory load.
Because working memory is the motor of reading comprehension, and the capacity of this motor is limited, overload will only bring negative effects. Reading activities, such as literacy, word formation, syntactic analysis, paragraph understanding … all these activities consume working memory.
Therefore, we should enrich our children's vocabulary at ordinary times. Vocabulary is very important for lexical chunks in primary reading. The bigger a child's vocabulary, the less likely it is to have reading comprehension difficulties.
In addition, when choosing books for children, we should pay attention to choosing books with appropriate difficulty. Too difficult books are not conducive to cultivating children's interest in reading, nor to exercising children's working memory.
2
Don't blindly pursue reading speed and reading quantity.
In this impetuous society, seeing the great god who reads 500 books a year every day will make us feel that reading fast and reading more is king. But this is not the case, especially when cultivating children's reading habits, there is no need to deliberately pursue reading speed and reading volume.
A book, let children read slowly, in the process of reading, summarize more, discuss more, ask more questions, and connect with reality, so that children can better combine what they read with the knowledge in long-term memory, and also help to transfer the information in working memory to long-term memory. Otherwise, you can't bite off more than you can chew, and you will forget all about it after reading it.
three
Encourage children to draw what they have read.
Both working memory and long-term memory prefer images. Encourage children to draw what they have read, and don't worry about whether the children draw well. In the process of painting, the child's brain will deeply process the text information to achieve the purpose of long-term memory. At the same time, the final picture is a good chunk, which can be better used for working memory when these memories need to be extracted after one day.
four
Proper recitation is necessary.
Memory needs conscious cultivation and exercise. Nowadays, many people are opposed to reciting, and more and more people think that knowledge need not be memorized, just know where to find it when using it. But in fact, it is difficult to deal with the knowledge found in working memory efficiently. As we discussed above, only information extracted from long-term memory can be partitioned or automated. The knowledge found now can only consume limited working memory capacity, which leads to difficulties in thinking.
For example, in the United States, many primary schools do not require children to recite multiplication formulas, and calculators are allowed to be used in exams. However, cognitive scientists have found that children who recite multiplication formulas have a better sense of numbers and more accurate calculations than those who don't. Even if they all use calculators, the former is better than the latter in mathematics.
Finally, in the words of Russian librarian Nikolai Rubakin:
References:
This article only authorizes the use of "read first"