AMOUNT OF SUBJECT MATTER AND RETENTION

The Effect of the Amount of Subject Matter on Retention

If your friend has offered you his number, one is a telephone number and the other one is his
mobile number, which one will you take? Others will probably take the mobile number for the sake of
efficient communication because mobile phones can be carried anywhere, thus text replies and chances of
answered calls are higher than in telephone which is only available mostly at home or in the workplace.
But there are also other people that will take the telephone number because of its faster flow of
communication and cost efficiency. In addition, telephone numbers are easier to remember and memorize
because there are only seven numbers available. We utilize our short-term and working memory when it
comes in recalling things immediately after their presentation. Our short-term memory serves as a
temporary storage for information that is usually and eventually tends to be forgotten on a short period of
time. Working memory, on one hand, which has a limited capacity, is the one responsible for holding,
processing, and manipulating information (Malenka, 2009). It is often associated with short-term memory
for they are both working together in dealing with information as they occur in our mind. Retention, on
the other hand, is the function of memory to recall things that have been briefly or persistently presented.
George Millers study on working memory, The magical number seven, plus or minus two:
Some limits on our capacity for processing information, argues that humans can hold seven plus or
minus two objects on their working memory (Miller, 1956). He asserted that recalling depends on the
number and with the category of things or chunks being stored. Another study of Nelson Cowan (2001),
noted the limitation of cognition to number four. According to Cowan (2001), there are four basic
conditions in which chunks can be identified: (1) when information overload limits chunks to individual
stimulus items, (2) when there are other things that block the recoding of stimulus, (3) performance
discontinuities, and (4) various indirect effects of the limited capacity. In another experiment conducted
by Gobet and Clarkson (2004), they concluded that it is only limited to two chunks, thus Miller and
Cowans assertion is an overestimate.

AMOUNT OF SUBJECT MATTER AND RETENTION

The different hypotheses, researches, and experiments, give us significant understanding as to what extent
our memory can hold information. They also offer us the vast opportunities to generate more experiments
to test their assertions. This study aims to objectively determine the effect of the amount of subject matter
presented to the participants on their recall and retention. The order of presentation of the subject matter,
and the focus and attention given by the participants have a significant role as well in this study. We
expect to find that there are more correct responses or recalled numbers from six 2-digit numbers than
nine 2-digit numbers. This will mean that the less subject matter presented, the greater the recall is.