Chunking is a common term in Instructional Design. Generally, the concept behind chunking is that to learn efficiently, people must be presented with the right amount of content, followed by opportunities to drill and practice until that content is mastered.

It is well known that people have both short term and long term memory capabilities. Information in short term memory must be transferred to long term memory, or it will disappear. Drill and practice is an instructional design term for the activities used to transfer new information from short term memory to long term memory.

The term chunking originated in a 1956 paper by George A. Miller, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information. The findings proved that most people have similar limits on the amount of information that can be held in short term memory, and it depends in part on the type of information being learned.

The concept of chunking complements Cognitive Load Theory. Learners have finite cognitive resources. If you overload the learner, knowledge transfer will not be efficient.