Information Processing Theory

Information processing theory treats the human mind as analogous to a computer system that receives, encodes, stores and retrieves information through a sequence of distinct stages, offering education a model for how learners take in and remember new material. A foundational formulation is Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin's 1968 multi-store model, which described information flowing from a brief sensory register through a limited-capacity short-term store into a more durable long-term store, contingent on rehearsal and encoding. The framework also drew on George Miller's 1956 finding that short-term memory can typically hold only about seven items at once, a constraint with direct implications for how much new material a lesson can present before overloading a learner's capacity to process it.