Page 228 - Nutrition Counseling and Education Skills: A Guide for Professionals

lowering one’s voice, using gestures, starting a discussion with a question, explaining a purpose, repeating
information more than once, and saying “this is important.” Gaining someone’s interest in a topic at hand and
indicating its importance to him or her as well as putting it in the context of what the person already knows
are all helpful approaches. The professional should indicate how the information will be useful or important.2

Asking questions arouses curiosity and interest. The use of open-ended questions is an effective technique
to solicit additional information. These questions typically begin with who, what, when, where, or why. Ask a
new employee, “What do you know about the meat slicer?” Or, ask a new client with heart disease, “What do
you know about saturated and trans fats?” Ask why they think learning this information is important to them.
This forces the person to focus attention.

Working Memory

The human mind is like a computer. It receives information, performs operations on it to change its form and
content, stores it, and retrieves it when needed.2,7 Not all information or stimuli are selected for further
processing, but some are focused on at a given moment.

As a person attends to something new and thinks about it, it enters the working memory. There are limits,
however, to the amount of new information that can be retained at one time, perhaps five to nine items, and
on the length of time it will be retained, probably 5 to 20 seconds.2 Repeating something new over and over,
such as the name of a person you have just met, helps to keep information in short-term memory longer. But
if you meet five new people at once, this can be too much new information to handle.

Besides repetition, you may attempt to associate new information with information currently in long-term
memory. Chunking, or grouping individual bits of information, also helps. For example, the telephone
number 467 3652 becomes 467 36 52. Because of memory limits, it is helpful to give not only oral
information but also written dietary guidelines to a client or a written task analysis to an employee, since
details are forgotten quickly.

Long-Term Memory

Using technology, a person takes the input and “saves” it onto digital format to be retrieved later often by
searching stored content. To move new information from working memory to long-term memory, a person
uses similar principles to organize it and integrate it with information already stored in a network of
interconnected neurons. Long-term memory involves three processes: encoding by attaching new information
to other related memories, storage, and retrieval. Who cannot recognize the smell of a chocolate cake baking
in the oven by retrieving the memory? Here, the professional needs to make it clear to clients and employees
what is important and probably repeat it more than once. It takes time and effort to reflect, to grasp the
implications, to interpret and experience, and to guide an internal representation of new knowledge in the
brain.2

The ability to recall rote information is limited, whereas meaningful information is retained more easily.
The implication for planning educational sessions for clients and employees is to make the information
meaningful to the individual, present it in a clear and organized manner, and relate it to what the individual
already knows and has stored in memory. The person can then connect it to other known information and
apply it if necessary.

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