Levels of Processing

Levels of processing is a theory of memory proposed by psychologists Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart in a 1972 paper, arguing against the era's dominant multi-store models of memory by claiming that how well information is remembered depends not on which memory store it passes through but on the depth of mental processing applied to it at the time of encoding. Craik and Lockhart distinguished shallow processing, such as noting the visual appearance or sound of a word, from deep processing, such as considering a word's meaning and connecting it to existing knowledge, and their experiments found that tasks requiring deeper, meaning-based processing produced substantially better later recall than tasks requiring only shallow, surface-level processing of the same material. In education the theory is frequently invoked to explain why study techniques that require a learner to engage with the meaning of material, such as explaining it in their own words, produce more durable learning than techniques involving only shallow repetition, such as simply rereading or copying text.