Four items per lesson

Four items per lesson .. or so says Dr Itiel Dror, a scientist at the School of Psychology, university of Southampton, in a presentation at a recent conference summarized by the British Computer Association [Link to Full Article]

Four items! That's a give or take number depending on the lesson content, but, according to Dror:

We are a machine with limited resources. We have limited information processing capacity. So when you design training, you need to think about which parts of the brain you are targeting. You need to make sure learning goes into modules to do with the memory. You can spread learning load over different modules to increase the amount of information that can be processed.

Some of his examples are old friends from adult learning theory. For example, lessons should be planned around learner prior knowledge, "a context with which the learner is familiar". Other examples, such as illuminating contrasts among items as a memory tool, are common sense to many of us.

His best advice, IMHO:

Focus on the learner, not on the material

Ah .. now therein lies the rub, don't you think? How many syllabii have you seen with learning objectives based on pacing or other content oriented features? (I have to cover this much of the book today). I'm afraid there are too many classes conducted from this perspective and, worse, I'm afraid the objectives do not drive the class anyway. What if we each took time to help our students identify the real take-aways based on the knowledge they already bring to the table?