Chapter 2, page 36
Problem 2.2 Understanding Students’ Thinking: Assessing Executive
Processing Capacities
You are curious about one of your twelfth grade history students’ executive
processing capacities. You learned about a test developed by Daneman and
Carpenter (1980) to assess working memory. You give the student the
following 4 statements. You cover up each one after she has read it. Then,
after she has read the last sentence, she is asked to recall the last word in each
sentence. You also tell her that you may stop at any time to ask her to
paraphrase the current sentence. (Try it yourself first.)The greengrocer sold many apples and oranges.
The sailor had been round the world several times.
The house had large windows and a massive mahogany door.
The bookseller crossed the room, scowled and threw the manuscript
on the chair.
The banker counted up the money at the end of the day.The student produced four words: oranges, door, chair, day
How would you evaluate her executive processing capacity?Response: Four words is a good performance on this task. (I got just 3 the first
time I tried it.) Her executive processing capacity is good. Consider how
difficult it is to recall four words on this task. The student must retain three
words in working memory while understanding a fourth sentence and then the
fourth end-of-sentence word to working memory. This requires both that the
student has a large executive processing capacity and that she is very efficient
at processing these sentence in relatively large chunks. For instance, in the last
sentence she might be able to store “the banker” as one chunk, “counted up”
as a second chunk, “the money” as a third chunk and “at the end of the day” as
a fourth chunk. Because she hasn’t stored individual words, she would not be
able to recall the exact words (she might recall that “the banker was checking
how much money there was” rather than that “the banker counted up the
money”). But she is able to retain the overall meaning. Even so, she would also
need a large executive processing capacity to retain all these chunks as well as
the individual words from the end of the sentences.Perception and Rehearsal
So far, we have examined two of the memory stores in the information processing system: the
sensory register and working memory. Perception is a process by which information moves from the
sensory register to working memory.
Perception is a complex process, involving many subprocesses. Two of these subprocesses are
classification and attention. Classification refers to how information is categorized in the sensory
register. As we discussed when we examined the sensory register, information in the sensory register has
not yet been classified or interpreted. Thus, an “H” is not an “H” but three lines that have not yet been