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In cognitive psychology and mnemonics, chunking refers to a strategy for making more efficient use of short-term memory by recoding information. More generally, Herbert Simon has used the term chunk to indicate long-term memory structures that can be used as units of perception and meaning, and chunking as the learning mechanisms leading to the acquisition of these chunks. Chunking means to organize items into familiar manageable units.

The word chunking comes from a famous 1956 paper by George A. Miller, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information. At a time when information theory was beginning to be applied in psychology, Miller observed that whereas some human cognitive tasks fit the model of a "channel capacity" characterized by a roughly constant capacity in bits, short-term memory did not. A variety of studies could be summarized by saying that short-term memory had a capacity of about "seven plus-or-minus two" chunks.

Miller noted that according to this theory, it should be possible to effectively increase short-term memory for low-information-content items by mentally recoding them into a smaller number of high-information-content items. "A man just beginning to learn radio-telegraphic code hears each dit and dah as a separate chunk. Soon he is able to organize these sounds into letters and then he can deal with the letters as chunks. Then the letters organize themselves as words, which are still larger chunks, and he begins to hear whole phrases." Thus, a telegrapher can effectively "remember" several dozen dits and dahs as a single phras

Beyond Brainstorming: Sustained Creative Work With Ideas Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter

(1)The challenge in all knowledge-based organizations is sustained creativity: working with and developing ideas into powerful and useful processes, products, or theories(2). Coming up with the initial idea represents one small step; creative knowledge workers are able to make something of the idea. Developing a capacity for sustained creative work with ideas is a new challenge for education.

This is quite at variance with the norms of every knowledge-based enterprise. Whether in pure research or industry, ideas are always assumed to be improvable. It is assumed that every theory or design will eventually be replaced by a better one, and creative knowledge workers of all sorts strive to bring this about. The engineer who declares “I have designed the ultimate automobile; there can be no further improvements” would soon be out of a job, replaced by someone with ideas for improvement. If students are to feel at home in the Knowledge Society, they must learn to feel comfortable with the knowledge that their own ideas, no matter how satisfactory they may seem at present, are improvable – and that improving them is their job, not something that a teacher or mentor can be expected to do for them.