Information stored in short term memory has a very limited time span, and there are two main reasons for this. Information can be displaced .ie. old information somehow keeps being dumped whenever more recent information enters. Information can decay .ie. where the memory trace becomes eroded over time by an unknown physiological process, so it's detail becomes progressively extinct. Often, each factor plays an equal role in memory loss. One way to encode in

In order for learning to occur, the information in short-term memory must be manipulated or transformed. The person will have to rehearse it, convert it, link it, or perform some other action with the information or else it will fade. Cognitive Psychologists present a framework for analyzing this process based upon teacher characteristics, knowledge and presentation; learner prior knowledge, strategies, cognitive processing and affective processing. They call this information manipulation process the encoding process. These strategies emphasize one or more of the four fundamental cognitive processes of the encoding process - selection, construction, integration and acquisition. Rehearsal and affective strategies emphasize the selection and acquisition processes, while elaboration and organization emphasized the construction and integration processes. Copying, underlining and taking selective verbatim notes are obviously selective activities. However these activities can be accomplished without any transfer of knowledge into short-term memory, and it is not uncommon to discover that a student may not remember any of the facts in an essay after having spent ten minutes underlining "important" passages. Similarly, chemistry students can organize lists of different types of acids without integrating the knowledge and transferring the lists to long-term memory. The necessary ingredient for the encoding process to occur is the "active" or conscious state of the learner while completing the task. Hence, "active" in the definitions of the four component processes.

There is another form of rehearsal (mentioned earlier) besides maintenance rehearsal, which is quite effective - elaborate rehearsal .ie. mental activities by which the individual organises the items he wishes to remember, encodes them, or relaets them to one another and to any stored information in long term memory. It may sound similar to maintenance rehea

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)