Learning Chunks - The History of Chunkiness in Learning

Do you think that I just came up with the term Chunky Learning? of course not! Learning Chunkitude has a long history, which began with the study "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information," a paper written in 1956 by the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller (Princeton University's Department of Psychology). You can enjoy his article at http://www.musanim.com/miller1956/, (originally published in The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97).

In the summary of this landmark study in chunkification of data, human cognitive chunkability, and perceptually chunkiness of tasks, he states in uncharacteristically clear language that:

"First, the span of absolute judgment and the span of immediate memory impose severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process, and remember. By organizing the stimulus input simultaneously into several dimensions and successively into a sequence or chunks, we manage to break (or at least stretch) this informational bottleneck."

What Miller observed is that people's "channel capacity" is between 5 and 9 choices, and that people can recall between 5 and 9 things.