Many times during the term, you may feel like your brain just cannot hold all of the information you are learning in your classes. Are there ways to improve our memories so that we can comprehend even more information? Research in cognitive psychology has suggested that the answer to that question is a resounding “yes”. This literature has suggested several strategies to improve memory, enhance recall, and increase retention of information.
One of the strategies identified by cognitive psychologists is that of chunking. Chunking refers to the process of taking individual units of information and grouping them into larger units (chunks). One common example of chunking occurs when we write and recall phone numbers. For example, a sequence of digits in a phone number, say 8-6-7-5-3-0-9, would be chunked into 867-5309.
In this activity, our class will perform an experiment to determine if familiar chunks of letters are easier to remember than less familiar ones. Our goal is to answer the following research question:
Much of the code for this tool was created with assistance from AI. Several test cases were run to ensure accuracy of results generated by this tool, but please reach out if you find any errors or bugs. Data files remain local on your machine as this tool runs, so using this tool should not incur additional risk of a data breach.
Thanks to Allan Rossman and Beth Chance for the initial creation of this activity as part of their NSF Grant: Concepts of Statistical Inference: A Randomization-Based Curriculum (#0633349). This website aims to be an alternative to their tool that provides tools for data visualization and summaries, avoids storing student data online publicly, and allows for a waiting period to exacerbate the effect of the chunking.