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36 CHAPTER 2mistakenly believe they will remember the information. Unfortunately,
they probably forget the information as soon as they leave the lec-
ture. Days or weeks later, some students will ask, “When did you tell
us that?”
Gagné (1985) estimated that individuals are likely to learn only
about one to six new ideas from each minute of a lecture, a small
number of the ideas that are typically presented during that time.
Therefore, students must constantly make important decisions about
what information to attend to and what information to neglect. It is
difficult enough to obtain important information from a lecture while
trying to be attentive. Imagine how much information is lost in lec-
tures when students are not attentive.
One of my favorite I Love Lucy reruns is when Lucy has a job where
she must place chocolates into boxes moving on a conveyor belt. Ini-
tially, the conveyor belt moves slowly and she easily places each of the
chocolates in the appropriate box. Soon the belt moves so rapidly that
she cannot pick up the chocolates fast enough. Many of the chocolates
move past her; some end up in her mouth, others in her blouse. It is
really funny to see how Lucy deals with her problem.
This episode reminds me of the WM in the IPS. The conveyor belt
represents information flowing into a human’s mind. Consider a lec-
ture at which the professor speaks rapidly and covers a great deal of
information. As you listen to the presentation, you have to make
quick decisions as to what content to process. When you decide some-
thing is important, you take notes on the information even if you do
not completely understand it. Information that you do not write down
is gone forever unless you read it in your textbook or get it from
another student. In many ways, the limitation of one’s WM is simi-
lar to the fast conveyor belt in the I Love Lucy episode.
One of the advantages of reading compared to note taking is that
you do not have to make quick decisions about what is important,
because you can read the material at your own pace and reread it as
many times as necessary. Strategies to help you remember more infor-
mation from lectures and textbooks are presented later.Long-Term Memory
Long-term memory stores all the information we possess but are
not immediately using. It is generally assumed that storage of infor-
mation in the LTM is permanent. That is, the information does not
fade from LTM, nor is it ever lost except perhaps as a result of senil-
ity or some other physical malfunction. Learning experts view the
problem of forgetting as the inability to retrieve or locate information
from memory rather than the loss of information.