Q.A student reads a chemistry definition twice, only noting how the sentence is punctuated, while another student reads the same definition once but works out what it actually means and links it to a real example. Using the Levels of Processing framework, explain which student is more likely to remember the definition a week later, and why.

The Levels of Processing view was put forward by Craik and Lockhart in 1972, as an alternative to thinking about memory purely in terms of separate stores, which is the approach the Stage Model takes. The central idea of the Levels of Processing view is that how well any new information is eventually retained depends on the way it is perceived, analysed, and understood at the time it is processed — that is, on how deeply it is processed — rather than on which 'store' (sensory, short-term, or long-term) it happens to occupy.

Craik and Lockhart proposed that incoming information can be analysed at more than one level. At the shallowest level, a person may attend only to the physical or structural features of the material — for example, noticing only the shape of the letters in a word, regardless of the case or ink colour used. At an intermediate level, a person may instead attend to the phonetic sounds attached to the letters, converting the structural features into at least one meaningful spoken word. Both structural and phonetic processing produce memory that is comparatively fragile and decays fairly quickly. There is a third, deeper level: analysing and understanding information in terms of its meaning — semantic encoding — which is the deepest level of processing and produces memory that resists forgetting considerably better than the shallower levels.

The Stage Model, by contrast, explains differences in memory primarily in terms of which store (sensory, short-term, or long-term memory) a piece of information currently occupies, and in terms of the control processes (attention, rehearsal, chunking) that move information between those stores. On the Stage Model, information is well remembered mainly because it has successfully been transferred into the permanent, high-capacity long-term store, via the control process of elaborative rehearsal. …