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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

Teaching Tips from Your TCC


Today’s tip has to do with memory and learning. I liberally borrowed this information from Daniel T. Willingham, the author of Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions about How the Mind Works and What It Means for Your Classroom, and our guest at the Teaching and Creativity Center’s June 10, 2011 lecture-workshop.  The information here comes from his book and two websites (URLs included).

Learned material is information that resides in long-term memory.  To get material we want to learn into long-term memory, we have to practice using it in our working, or short-term, memory for some time. In other words, we have to pay attention. Sustained practice over time is especially useful for developing automaticity in specific skills and in ensuring that a memory lasts as long as needed.. This enables higher-level thinking. Thus, the following types of material are worthy of practice:

1.       Knowledge that will be used again and again.  Practice builds automaticity, and this frees up working memory. As we’ve observed in our classrooms, students who cannot remember the rules of punctuation and usage (or depend on using a reference book to find those rules) cannot allocate enough working memory resources to also focus on developing their content. Similarly, students who don’t have simple math facts in their long-term memory struggle with higher math.

2.      The type of knowledge that students need to know well in the short term to enable long-term retention of key concepts. A science teacher may want students to know a set of facts about certain species so that she can introduce an important abstract concept concerning evolution that depends on these facts. A history teacher may want students to master the facts of several Supreme Court cases in order to build long-term understanding of a particular constitutional principle.

3.      The type of knowledge we believe is important enough that students should remember it later in life. We might consider certain material so vital to an education that it is worthy of sustained practice over many years to assure that students remember it all of their life. Exactly what sorts of knowledge merit the focus required to create long-lasting memory will be controversial, but that practice is required to create such memories is not.

Memories are lost mostly due to missing or ambiguous cues. To improve retention, we can guide students to make memories distinctive, to distribute studying over time, and to plan for forgetting by continuing to study after the material is familiar. Let them know that personal assessments of knowledge tends to be faulty, so rather than use an internal gauge to know whether or not they’ve studied enough, they should test themselves in the same way they’ll be tested in class.

https://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/12/study-skills-ought-to-include-an-understanding-of-memory/

https://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/spring2004/willingham.cfm

Julie Damerell
Transitional Studies
09/20/2010