Replaying history

Squire, K., & Barab, S. (2004). Replaying history: engaging urban underserved students in learning world history through computer simulation games. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 6th international conference of the learning sciences (ICLS), Santa Monica, California. 

Civilization III was brought into school for underserved students to explore the potential of using games to engage 

learners. Study examines how the learning about history occurs with Civilization III.

History has been treated as myth or heritage and this lead to misconceptions about history, alienate students and 

most students hate the history as a result. The way it has been taught was all about meaningless recitation of 

names, dates and facts, with no understanding of the practices through which historians construct and judge, and the 

connections between events.

With Civilization III, the method of studying history changes from memorizing to exploring emergent properties of a 

simulated system.

The experiment was done with case studies which has multiple data gathering and analysis, pre and post tests.

The collection of data was done by capturing student's gameplay practices, and by capturing student's social 

interactions. The analysis focused on:

- gaming and social practices emerged

- moments of engagement or lack 

- student's displayed understanding of historical phenomena

- affordances and constraints of Civilization III

Findings: 

- Learning to play Civilization was complex (appropriation process)

- After fourth day students started to appropriate the game

- Then it was a process of trying different strategies and examining the game's affordances

- most of the learning came through failure, which caused students to start over with a different strategy

- teacher's primary function was to help students construct narratives for unfolding play and devising strategies that 

brought knowledge of geography or history as a tool for gameplay (scaffolding)

- failure drove recursive cycles of identifying problems, developing interpretations of events, devising solutions, 

implementing solutions, examining results and repeating.

- powerful learning happened when students presented what they learned

As a result, this study suggests that the games in school can be very powerful for engaging learners even thought 

that engagement is a complex process.

What Happens When Video Games Enter the Classroom

Squire, K. 2005. Changing the game: What happens when video games enter the classroom?. Innovate 1 (6). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=82 .


Games, known as fun, engaging, and immersive, have been studied and found to be requiring deep thinking and complex problem solving skills.
This paper suggests that games really help learning so the educators should study building better school environment with games. In the paper video game, Civilization III is used as an example for history class.
According to Malone (1981), Cordova and Lepper (1996) games create intrinsic motivation through fantasy, control, challenge, curiosity and competition.
According to Gee (2005), Shaffer (2004), (2005), games in classroom would leverage players' desires to develop new skills and better understand world from a new perspective.
From constructivist approach, Piaget(1962) and Vygotsky(1978) agree that play is a crucial method through which we test ideas, develop new skills and participate in new social roles.

Difficulty of a game makes the game more engaging. Civilization III was good for being flexible and replayable, which means it lets the player to replay the history according to player's decisions. Even though, students thought Civilization III was more difficult than anything they study at school, they were interested in it because they were able to access the complex professional practices and manage them.

Failure was a precondition for learning in the experiment, it forced students to cycles of recursive play         .

A curriculum based on Civilization III removed the traditional hierarchies which are having some being successful in a traditional schooling while other always fail. The successful students weren't happy with the fact that they weren't as successful as they are in traditional curriculum. However, others became more successful in the new curriculum, developing complex understanding instead of being unrecognized in traditional approaches.

The way the learning happens with playing Civilization, problem identification, hypothesis testing, interpretative analysis, and strategic thinking, more close to real life than learning through a traditional curriculum.

Conclusion: not only bringing games to schools but also need to change the school environment:
- new curriculum by considering personal relevance to students
- opportunities for students with different interests
- days and curricula should be organized by students, parents, teachers' goals
- no limit in the learning experience
- assessment = opportunities to support learning

Introduction to Multimedia Learning

Mayer, R.E. (Ed.) (2005). Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning. New York: Cambridge. [Chapters 1]


Multimedia learning hypothesis: people can learn from words and pictures than from words alone.
Multimedia: presenting both words (verbal form: spoken or printed text) and pictures (pictorial form: illustrations, photos, animation or video).
How to characterize form of presentation:
1- delivery media view: focuses on technology rather than the learner
2- presentation modes view: presenting material in verbal and pictorial forms - the same idea with dual coding theory
3- sensory media view: pictures are processed visually 
Mayer rejects the delivery media view.


Multimedia Learning: Building mental representations from words and pictures - which is the focus of Mayer's cognitive theory of multimedia


Multimedia Instruction: Presenting words and pictures that are intended to promote learning


Why Multimedia Learning
Students perform well both on retention and transfer tests, and on problem solving transfer tests when pictures and words are presented together than words only.


If there is two channels for information processing, one for verbal and one for visual material, then 
- quantitative rationale suggests that more material can be presented on two channels than one, 
- qualitative rationale suggests that understanding occurs when learner builds a meaningful connection between visual and verbal representations. - while building this connection, learner can create a deeper understanding


Basic Principles of Multimedia
multimedia principle: people learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.
split-attention principle: people learn better when words and pictures are physically and temporally integrated.
modality principle: people learn better from graphics and narration than form graphics and printed text
redundancy principle: people learn better when the same information is not presented in more than one form
segmenting, pretraining and modality principles:  people learn better from a multimedia message
 - when it is presented in segments; 
 -  that they know the names and characteristics of the main concept
 - when the words are spoken instead of written
coherence, spatial contiguity, temporal contiguity and redundancy principles: people learn better
 - when extraneous material is excluded
 - when cues are added that highlight the organization of material
 - when corresponding words and pictures are presented near on the screen or page or in time
 - from graphics and narration rather than graphics and on screen text
personalization, voice, and image principles: people learn better 
 - when words are in a conversational style rather than formal
- when the words are spoken in (standard accented) human voice rather than machine voice (or foreign accented human voice)
-people do not necessarily learn better when the speaker's image is on screen 


Advanced Principles of Multimedia 
guided-discovery principle: people learn better when guidance is incorporated into discovery-based multimedia environments
worked-out principle: people learn better when they receive worked-out examples in initial skill learning
collaboration principle: people learn better with collaborative online learning activities
self-explanation principle: people learn better when they are encouraged to generate self-explanations during learning 
animation and interactivity principle: people do not necessarily learn better from animation than from static diagrams
navigation principle: people learn better in hypertext environments when appropriate navigation aids are provided
site map principle: people learn better in an online environment when the interface includes a map showing where the learner is 
prior knowledge principle: Instructional design principles that enhance multimedia learning for novices  may hinder multimedia learning for more expert learners 
cognitive aging principle:  Instructional design principles that effectively expand working memory capacity are especially helpful for older learners


Technology-centered vs. Learner-centered 
Mayer points out the failures with technology-centered approach:Instead of adapting technology for humans, the humans are forced to adapt the technology.
However, learner-centered approach understands the human first. Norman calls this human-centered technology


Multimedia learning as knowledge construction (active learner) instead of:
 - response strengthening (passive learner, receiver of rewards or punishments), or
 - information acquisition (passive learner, reciever of information ) 
In the knowledge construction approach, multimedia's goal is cognitive guidance system 


Two goals of learning:
- remembering
- understanding


Three kinds of multimedia learning outcomes
No learning: no retention or no transfer
Rote learning: good retention but no transfer
Meaningful learning: both retention and transfer of knowledge to other problems


Two kinds of active learning:
 Research shows meaningful learning depends on learner's cognitive activity rather than behavorial activity

Chocolate Covered Broccoli

Game : http://www.icivics.org/games/activate, Help out at the shelter 

Help out at the shelter is an online game developed for the iCivics website, an educational project aim to teach the kids about the civics and how to become active participants. Help out at the shelter, is part of the Activate section of the games.

The game starts with asking the player to select a character. The character options look alike hence player won't feel the ownership of the avatar that is representing him. 

On the next screen, the player sees his character at his room with arrows pointing at: the tasks the player should complete, the current objective, and player himself. Once clicked on the player, the options for what the player should do next pops up and the first and only option in the beginning is Volunteer. Volunteer takes the player to the task page, where the player can see the tasks he can select. There are locked tasks which will be unlocked as the player completes others. There is a personal task, which can be achieved by the player only. At first, this is not that clear but as the game proceeds, some friends join the player and help complete the tasks.

One of the tasks is taking care of a shelter. First, there is information on the screen about how many dogs need what and tools to tend the dogs' needs. This information screen comes on for every task if it is the first time playing it. The needs are water, food and cleaning. As the game starts, the player needs to pay attention to the exclamation marks appearing above the dogs. Then the player should take action according to the need in a given time. Once the time is out, a white box with text shows how many needs the player had met. 

Next, the player appears back in his room, the home screen, where he can choose to volunteer for a new task. If the first task was successful, the player can go to the next task. If not, then the player has to play the same task till he can meet some amount of the needs. A task gets 100 % if completed successfully, and then next tasks become unlocked. If the task is not achieved, then the percentage can raise by 25 with every trial.

One problem with this game is that, the player does not need to care about the outcome of an action he takes. He is not attached to the outcome which results in no conflict or challenge throughout the game. The player can choose a task and repeat it over and over without worrying about the consequences. As a result, the player forgets the goal of the game, which is learning how to be an active participant. This makes the game almost just an interactive simulation that the learner steps through tasks and completes them.

Another problem is about losing the learning part of it. The “game” part surpasses the “learning” part and it becomes chocolate covered broccoli. A task example for this is where the player has to do bake sale. He has to give the appropriate baked goods to the person who wants it. The baked good, the person wants, appears on top of his/her head. The player has to right click and hold the baked goods, and keep holding down the right button and release it when the correct person is aimed. He has to respond to these at a certain time. This part gets a little out of the scope and becomes challenging nut in a way that is more like aiming at the right direction with the mouse within the given time. Player doesn’t learn anything related to being an active participant at this task, instead he repetitively gives cakes to other characters.

A game, whether for learning or not, has to have quantifiable outcomes, that is attached to the player. Depending on the outcome, the player can feel challenged, and this creates player effort. The player becomes more engaged with the game when there is a challenge. Player’s engagement and effort helps the player keep in mind the real goal of the game. For an educational game, the goal of learning a concept should always be out there, throughout the game play.

For this game to be suitable for the description of a game for learning, the tasks should have consequences like showing what happens if player can’t achieve one particular task. For example, for the taking care of the animals at the shelter, the player should see the dogs hungry or thirsty with a visual or sound feedback to let the player know that he has to give food or water to those dogs within the given time. That would also create emotional design in the game, and the player would feel ownership. These, emotional design and ownership, would result in better learning outcomes.

For the chocolate part of the game, that makes it a game with no learning goal, the player could make calculations for raising money and it could involve problem solving as if it is a real bake sale. The player can think about how much money should be raised, how this could be done and what are the expenses of baking and income, etc.

Dual Coding Theory and Education

Clark, J.M., & Paivio, A. (1991). Dual Coding Theory and Education. Educational Psychology Review, 3, 149-210


Dual coding theory (DCT) is a characterization of mental processes that underlie human behavior and experience.
-nonverbal mental systems processing of imagery information
-verbal mental systems processing of linguistic information
-referential connections: links that connect verbal and nonverbal representations
     allows for imaging to words or naming to pictures
-associative connections: joins representations within verbal and nonverbal systems  - words are linked to other words
- past experience plays a role in these connections


Image properties:
-instructions and related context can effect the arousal of imagery
-imagery value/concreteness that reflect availability of the material
-variation among people in the tendency and capacity in using imagery, individual differences


-probability and ease of image arousal plays an important role in representation of text meaning
-associative relations connect words to one another and activation of this associative structure contributes to the meaning of words
-According to DCT, learning is related to imagery and associative processes
-DCT suggests images, use of concrete and personal examples and teaching behaviors help learner comprehend and retent the lessons by activating concrete referents and increasing the arousal of mental images  

Animations Need Narrations

Mayer, R.E., & Anderson, B. (1991). Animations Need Narrations: An Experimental Test of a Dual-coding Hypothesis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 3, 484-490


The paper tries to answer the questions: does the animations work better for learners when the words are given before the words (before the animation) or when words are given with the pictures (during animation)  


single-code hypothesis: there is only one mode of mental representation for words and pictures
separate dual-code hypothesis: there is two distinct visual and verbal models of mental representation->theory: learner transfer material better when the information is given in two modes, visual and verbal.

integrated dual-code hypothesis: Paivio's dual coding theory, learners can build both visual and verbal modes of mental representation and the connection between them


Experiments results:
-simultaneous presentation of verbal and visual resulted better performance than the separate presentations of visuals and words --> supporting the integrated dual coding theory  
-words with picture group outperformed the words before picture group

For Whom is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words

Mayer, R.E., Sims, V.K. (1994). For whom is a picture worth a thousand words? Extensions of a dual-coding theory of multimedia learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 86, 389-401.

The paper examines how students' the role of spatial ability in learning from verbal and visual instruction to be able to describe how words and pictures should be used in scientific explanations. The experiments looks at whether giving the verbal and visual information concurrently or successively would help learners understand better.

Dual-coding theory of multimedia learning: three steps process of how visual and verbal presentations can be integrated in learner's working memory during learning.
1- Construction of verbal representation connection,Verbal encoding : from external representation to internal (mental) representation
2- Construction of visual representation connection, Visual encoding : from external representation to internal (mental) representation
3- Construction of referential connections between the two mental representations

According to this model of dual coding theory, instructions that promote these three connections,  promote problem solving.

The contiguity effect: When verbal and visual representations are presented contiguously vs separately.
Role of experience in learning from animations and narrations:  Low experience learners most likely to benefit from the words and pictures that are presented simultaneously. So the experiments are not done for high experience learners.
Role of ability in learning from animations and narrations: spatial visualization, the ability to mentally rotate or fold objects in two or three dimensions and imagine the changing configuration that would result from such manipulations.

High spatial ability learner:

• should be able to construct connections between visual and verbal representations when they are presented simultaneously or separately. 
• has large contiguity effect for high spatial ability learners, because they can enhance the coordinated visual and verbal information

Low spatial ability learner

• can only construct connection when the visual and verbal information are simultaneous. 
• have shorter memory spans

Experiment and results:

• low spatial ability learners need to devote more cognitive resources to build connections then high spatial ability learners 
• low spatial ability learners didn't show a significant difference between the learners that received concurrent, successive presentation or no presentation.
• inexperienced students were better in transferring what they learned when visual and verbal information were concurrent - explains the dual coding theory of multimedia learning
• contiguity effect was strong for high spatial ability learners- spatial ability enhances the coordinated instructions

I LOVE BROCCOLI

Eating healthier, staying fitter, living better...
I have always wanted to create an app that helps kids take care of their health. It is very important for kids to be able to know what they need to eat, what they shouldn't eat, how they should exercise, etc.

For Architecture of Learning Environments class, we need to come up with a project idea, which we will be working on throughout the semester. We, as a group of five people from all over the world - China, India, Turkey, Taiwan, Trinidad -, came up with a health information app that promotes healthy living options for kids of age 7 to 13.

Challenge I: digesting Google dinner

I joined the Technovation challenge as a mentor to help high school girls build and market an Android application. The program is organized by Iridescent Learning, and it is taking place at Google NYC. Thanks to them, we get to meet these awesome girls, who are passionate about this whole program - which runs for 12 weeks. My team is now 6 girls, plus the TA, and me (8 girls)! They are all fun to work with.

We haven't got into the building the application yet, we are still at the brainstorming point. But we are really brainstorming though: there are 3 girls that come up with different ideas every second! And honestly, all of them are really great ideas. Now they have five different app ideas -which I am not going to mention here- and all of these are apps that are necessary out there.

While we were brainstorming, I was thrilled by how these girls think of futuristic subjects! I don't know whether it is the movies like Minority Report, or whether it is iPhone app store that makes them so creative, but they do have a lot of ideas that they think can be seen in the future, and that are already a research subjects at some universities.

The NICE project: Narrative, Immersive, Constructionist/Collaborative Environments for Learning in Virtual Reality

Roussos, M., Johnson, A., Leigh, J., Barnes, C., Vasilakis, C., & Moher, T. (1997). The NICE project: Narrative, immersive, constructionist/collaborative environments for learning in virtual reality. Proceedings of ED-MEDIA/ED-TELECOM '97, 917-922.

NICE project is built to create a narrative, constructionist, collaborative environment for kids. It is based on two earlier projects, CALVIN (collaborative architectural layout via immersive navigation), and the Graphical Story Writer, a shared workspace where kids complete stories.

NICE has a virtual reality system, a multi person room size environment, CAVE. The kids can interact in this system by wands and joysticks. Kids have their own avatars once they enter the CAVE with stereoglasses.

The example in the paper is an ecosystem, where the kids are selecting and dropping seeds, and then the corresponding tree, plant or flower grows depending on the conditions the kid provide, i.e. enough water, sunlight, etc.

The authors claim that the NICE supports:

-Piaget’s constructivism, which states that learner’s mental construction is the cause of learning

-Papert’s constructionism, which is constructing of a meaningful product, discovery learning. The kids also construct the stories the ecological microworlds revolve around. Any action the student takes is written with pictures and published on a web page.

-Collaboration: participating in a group activity both virtual and physically, the kids get a shared experience. Kids can communicate by waving at each other, etc. Vygotsky suggests social interaction for development of cognition, and according to the authors, the virtual reality setting achieves this.

Evaluation: The authors claim that for complex systems like ecological system, with many variables and behaviors, are difficult to watch in a real outdoor activity. These systems need careful attention to visualize the behaviors. In a virtual environment, one can see the behavior, since the variables can be arranged. Further evaluation, also, is necessary which requires a comparison between a real garden and the virtual one.

Overall, this paper was written in 1997 so technology used was very expensive and large in size. The project is much easier to build and more realistic to have in classrooms with today’s technology.  

Learning Sciences theories and Elearning

Hoadley, C. (2007). Theories and methods from learning sciences for e-learning. In R. Andrews & C. Haythornthwaite (Eds.), Handbook of E-Learning Research (pp. 139-156). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.


Goals of  Elearning Research: to provide theories, tools, activities and design models.


Scope and goals of Learning Sciences: To understand what makes learning environments work and how to design better ones.


History of the Learning Theories
Freud's psychoanalysis is the beginning of psychology. Then comes behaviorism, by Skinner, as a reaction to Freud's psychoanalysis. Behaviorism thought learning was a simple conditioning . Learners are conditioned to perform correctly by using feedback and conditioning. According to Ragan and Smith (1999), behaviorists look at learning as  the acquisition of a new behavior based on environmental conditions.


Then something similar but not identical to behaviorism, instructivism, which holds that people learn things through simple transmission of messages. However, in behaviorism, people learn by being conditioned to respond to a certain stimuli. Radical behaviorists reject the mental state, thoughts, feelings, etc., and consider mind as a black box. 


Contrast to behaviorism,  Dewey developed progressive education theory, which is based on more practice and claims that education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. There is a strong connection between the learner, social context, and resources. Learning is by doing and authentic experiences. 


Jean Piaget comes with developmentalism, where he thinks a child's development resembles the biological development of an organism. Piaget's constructivism is the one of the most important theory in education.  Constuctivism states that individual must create ideas and ways of thinking based on his/her experience, learner's mental construction is the cause of learning. 
Late 20th century, as the computers get more and more accessible, information processing theory  became powerful. This theory sees mind as a computer and learning as the process of the computer encoding the information.   


Finally Vygotsky, came up zone of proximal development, that describes type of problem solving which cannot be done without the help of an assistance, scaffolding. This also forms the bases of situated learning theory, by Lave and Wenger, which argues that learning is more of a social process than a mental one (as opposed to Piaget's mental construction), that processes through enculturation, where learners pick up habits and practices of the society.


Distributed cognition: which analyzes social and cultural phenomenon from the point of view of people and their tools as a distributed information processing systems.
Cognitive apprenticeship: in which learners are viewed as supported through cognitive processes by social actors and technologies.
Papert's constructionism: discovery learning by constructing a meaningful product
Learning sciences are pluralistic, multi disciplinary, studies learning in real settings, and hence need an existing functional environment. This way it would be practical and support usable knowledge.  Here the design is the focus as the scientists need a working environment.

The Game, The Player , The World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness

Juul, Jesper. "The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness." 2003. http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/gameplayerworld/ 

A good game definition should describe three things:
1) The kinds of systems set up by the rules of a game
2) The relation between the game and the player of the game
3) The relation between the playing of the game and the rest of the world.
Commonalities in seven definitions: voluntary activity, governed by rules, players engaged in conflict.
If we want to explain games in three levels as described above:
- Rules describe game as a formal system
- Goals, interaction describe the game as the relation between the game and the player
- Conflict describes the relation between the game and the rest of the world

The game definition with 6 points:
1) Rules, 2) Variable, quantifiable outcome, 3) Value assigned to possible outcomes, 4) Player effort (games are challenging.) 5) Player attached to outcome, 6) Negotiable consequences

Transmedial gaming
Computers are capable of performing 1) the operations defined in the rules of the games, operations that is normally be performed by humans, and 2) the keeping track of the game state which is normally done using cards and board pieces. What we have is therefore an ecology of game media that support gaming, but do so differently, and of games that move between different media, sometimes with ease, sometimes with great difficulty.

Instructional Design

Smith & Ragan (1999). Instructional Design. New York: Wiley. [ Chapters 1, 2 ]

Instructional design: systematic and reflective process of translating principles of learning an instruction into plans for instructional materials, activities, information resources and evaluation.

Instruction: intentional arrangement of experiences, leading to learners acquiring particular capabilities.

Education: all experiences which people learn

            Unplanned, incidental, informal

Training: those instructional experiences that are focused upon individuals acquiring very specific skills they can apply immediately.

Teaching: facilitated by human being, by a live teacher.

Constructivism:

An educational philosophy within a larger category of philosophy called rationalism. Resource is the primary source of knowledge and that reality is constructed rather than discovered.

Piaget, “knowledge is not transmitted it is constructed”

Individual constructivist:

Knowledge is constructed from experience

Learning results from personal interpretation of knowledge

Learning is an active process

Social constructivist:

Learning is collaborative with meaning negotiated from multiple perspectives

Contextualism:

Learning should occur (situated) in realistic settings

Testing should be integrated in the task not a separate activity

Empricism: objectivism, knowledge is acquired through experience.

Pragmatism: knowledge is acquired through experience but this is interpreted by a reason.

Learning Theories

Behaviorism: focuses on observable behavior

Behaviorists look at learning as acquisition of new behavior based on environmental conditions. Behavioral theory has stimulus-response relationship with environment.

Cognitive Learning Theories:

Learning is active, cognitive process

High level processes present in learning

Cumulative nature and prior knowledge’s role

Concern for the way knowledge is represented and organized in the memory

Analyzing learning tasks performance

Critique- AppInventor: http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/

AppInventor is a platform, created by Google, for non-programmers to create Android applications. I was told about it, during my training for Technovation Challenge, which is a three months mentorship program to teach high school girls how to develop and market an Android app. I would like to mention AppInventor’s website.

The AppInventor website has a video that simply describes what the platform and its components look like. The video doesn’t go into details about how to create an app.

The website is very neat and the dominant color has given the “clean” look that makes it easy to follow through. There are four categories, one of which is the tutorials page. Once you are on the tutorials page you can rather watch a video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nC_x9iOby0g) that actually describes how to design an app, by going over an example, or you can click on other tutorials about how to setup the AppInventor with an Android phone and computer, or how to create an application, etc.

The tutorials for creating applications are very straightforward. There are subtitles, in a consistent font, that indicate it is a step for adding, or making something, so, for example, one can switch to step for  “adding a button” very easily. Also, the instructions are given in an order that is creating the design first, and then, handling the events. These step by step, first front-end and then back-end, instructions make it easy to recall the next time one starts a new project. There are some words written in the site’s dominant color if it is a component of the AppInventor. For handling the events part, where one adds functionality to the design just created, there are some texts surrounded with dashed lines like:  when Button1.Click which indicates an event.

The instructions are followed by a screenshot that explains the state of the project during that step. In the screenshot below, the user is selecting the Button1 and renaming it. These screenshots can also be watched in the video given in the main tutorial page.

Tips, which help solving issues, e.g. failing to upload an image. These helpful tips are right under the steps that can be problematic in some situations. There is also forum where one can ask for help, share their solution, etc.

Overall the website is easy to use, and very informative about the AppInventor.  It doesn’t require prior knowledge in Android development or computer science.

Magic Number 7, plus or minus two

Miller, G. (1956). The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information. The Psychological Review, 63, 81-97.
Information measurement Miller uses a a communication system example to describe information received by an observer. According to this example, observer becomes the communication channel, stimuli is input and response is output. He suggests that the measure of transmitted information is a input-output correlation.
Absolute judgement: If observer’s absolute judgments are quiet accurate, then all the input information will be transmitted and will be recovered from his responses.
Channel capacity: As the given information is increased, the the transmitted informtation will increase and at some value it will start to go down. This value is channel capacity.
To measure absolute judgment in unidimensional stimulis, there have been experiments on loudness, taste, points on a line. Channel capaticity for these experiment ranges from 1.6  to 3.9 bits which equals to 3 to 15 categories.
When the experiments are done with multi dimensional stimuli, the total capacity increases. Multi dimensional meaning more variables added, e.g. x, y position of a point instead ofn a point on a line.
The span of immediate memoryspan of absolute judgment: the limit to the accuracy which is usually close to number seven
To change this limit, the author suggests to arrange the task so that one can make absolute judgements in a sequence. This way the limitation becomes the number of items instead of amount of information. Number of bits of information is constant for absolute judgment and number of chunks of information is constant for immediate memory.
Recoding: grouping the information into units or chunks e.g. a 18 bit binary number into  9 idigits in base 4, those 9 digits to 6 digits in base 8, etc a huge information can be processed by immediate memory within these less number of chunks.