Enhancing Learning Through Facilitating Techniques and Environments: The Role of the Working Memory and Current Performance

As well as evaluating and assessing students, teachers perceptions of humour and playfulness, and the roles of these concepts within the classroom environment: particularly as facilitating tools for easing stress, improving relationships within the school environment: as opposed to obstructing and hindering tools to learning, This survey will aim to identify challenges to the facilitation of effective teaching techniques and practices within the school environment. As highlighted through the literature relating to the topic on adaptive coping strategies, and positive psychology the concepts of humour and play can apply, as well as be interpreted broadly. Hence the differences in interpretation, the boundaries within which they can and should be used, should also be defined. However, given specific and differing relationships – as well as the need to consider individual backgrounds and social, cultural contexts, a general interpretation cannot be applied across all levels. The need for equity in applying rules generally to students will require a degree of flexibility depending on the stress levels applicable to individual students: based on the family backgrounds, pressures faced at school – as well as at home. Whilst some students face little or no pressures from home: inclusive of pressures to perform well in their exams, some may face additional financial, social – as well as pressures of adapting to the school environment: for various reasons and based on personal and family backgrounds. It’s important for teachers to be aware of pressures that individual students may be facing and incorporate such vital knowledge in helping and explaining why humour and stress coping strategies need to be encouraged. According to Bjork and Bjork (2011:57), “Performance is what we can observe and measure during instruction or training. Learning, that is, the more or less permanent change in knowledge or understanding that is the target of instruction, is something we must try to infer, and current performance can be a highly unreliable index of whether learning has occurred.” How impactful are the learning environments and learning techniques on current performance? How does such performance, that is, current performance, impact long term learning? Further, how does current performance interact and relate with short term and working memory? Cowan (2008) concludes that “the distinction between long term memory and short term memory depends on whether it can be demonstrated that there are properties specific to short term memory - main contenders of which are temporal decay and chunk capacity limit.” How motivated is a learner in desiring to learn - such that he or she is able to retain - as well as utilise such knowledge for longer periods of time than other counterparts? Contrastingly, how much retention capacity do individual learners have irrespective of whether or not they are motivated or inspired to learn a particular topic - independent of hereditary factors which may influence capacities to retain, learn or utilise acquired knowledge? How impactful are environmental factors such as living or learning conditions on their ability to retain, utilise such knowledge - as well as on their desire to learn a topic? These constitute some of the questions, as well as literature to be consolidated upon, as a means of contributing to the topic at hand, that this paper will focus on. Further, pursuant to the National Foundation for Educational Research’s recent report that “ the UK parliament are currently debating the case for the government to use wellbeing as a key indicator of national performance”, this survey will incorporate the concept of well being in the regression analysis of the data to be collected from its investigation.