How memory works is actually how curriculum should work
Written by: Juan Fernandez
7 min read
How we learn
It’s been more than 100 years since Edward Thorndike published his book Educational Psychology (1913), establishing the foundations of the science with that name. A few years earlier, his master, William James, had described a model with two types of memory: primary and secondary. According to this model, the primary memory consisted of thoughts that were consciously held for a short time, while the secondary memory consisted of a permanent, unconscious storage of data (James, 1975). Thanks to Thorndike and James, in 1968 Atkinson and Shiffrin developed a model proposing that human memory is made up of three parts: a sensory register, where sensory-type information becomes part of memory; a long-term data storage, where memories, facts and procedures are stored; and a short-term data storage, also called working memory, which receives sensory data as well as data from long-term memory.
During recent decades, alternative frameworks have emerged from this model, with B
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