This week's article summary is Why Do Students Remember Everything That's on Television and Forget Everything I Say?
An article summary from last year focused on the different ways episodic (more emotional) and semantic (more repetitive) experiences get stored in long-term memory.
Emotional experiences are placed in our long-term memory because our brain is stimulated in a variety of ways. Our brain stores big, emotional events (like weddings, births, UGA football winning this year’s college football championship) because our brains experience them via many senses. We don’t have to do any studying, reviewing, or thinking about these emotional experiences: they naturally get placed in our memories because they are so unique and dramatic.
Learning in school, on the other hand, primarily results from semantic experiences. To store in long-term memory what we experience in school, we must intentionally and frequently think about them, reflect on them, and review them. Just because you may not be able to remember much about your third grade classroom doesn’t mean you didn’t learn a lot that year. It’s just not stored in your brain as an episodic experience.
As the article below attests, for semantic experiences to stick, kids need to think over and over again about the material, what it means, and, most importantly, practice retrieving and using it. It’s basically what metacognition is: having kids think about their thinking, why the information matters, and how it connects to prior knowledge. The article provides a number of ways teachers can help guide students to think, reflect, retrieve, and remember.
Joe
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Memory is mysterious. You may lose a memory created 15 seconds earlier, such as when you find yourself standing in your kitchen trying to remember what you came there to fetch. Other seemingly trivial memories (for example, advertisements) may last a lifetime. What makes something stick in memory, and what is likely to slip away?
We can’t store everything we experience in memory. Too much happens. So what should the memory system tuck away?
Your memory system lays its bets this way: if you think about something carefully, you’ll probably have to think about it again, so it should be stored. Thus, your memory is not a product of what you want to remember or what you try to remember; it’s a product of what you think about.
The cognitive principle that guides this article is memory is the residue of thought. To teach well, consider what an assignment will actually make students think about (not what you hope they will think about), because that is what they will remember.
We all know that students won’t learn if they aren’t paying attention. What’s more mysterious is why, when they are paying attention, they sometimes learn and sometimes don’t. What else is needed besides attention?
A reasonable guess is that we remember things that bring about some emotional reaction. Aren’t you likely to remember really happy moments, such as a wedding? You are, and in fact if you ask people to name their most vivid memories, they often relate events that probably had some emotional content.
If memory depended on emotion, we would remember little of what we encounter in school. So the answer Things go into long-term memory if they create an emotional reaction is not quite right. It’s more accurate to say, Things that create an emotional reaction will be better remembered, but emotion is not necessary for learning.
Repetition is another obvious candidate for what makes learning work. Repetition is very important, but not just any repetition will do. Material may be repeated almost indefinitely and still not stick in your memory.
It’s equally clear that wanting to remember something is not the magic ingredient. How marvelous it would be if memory did work that way. Students would sit down with a book, say to themselves, “I want to remember this,” and they would! You’d remember the names of people you’ve met, and you’d always know where your car keys are. Sadly, memory doesn’t work that way.
Your brain lays its bets this way: If you don’t think about something very much, then you probably won’t want to think about it again, so it need not be stored. If you do think about something, then it’s likely that you’ll want to think about it in the same way in the future.
There are a couple of subtleties to this obvious conclusion that we need to draw out. First, when we’re talking about school, we usually want students to remember what things mean.
The second subtlety (again, obvious once it’s made explicit) is that there can be different aspects of meaning for the same material. For example, the word piano has lots of meaning-based characteristics. You could think about the fact that it makes music, or about the fact that it’s expensive, or that it’s really heavy, or that it’s made from fine-quality wood, and so on.
The obvious implication for teachers is that they must design lessons that will ensure that students are thinking about the meaning of the material. A striking example of an assignment that didn’t work for this reason came from my nephew’s sixth-grade teacher. He was to draw a plot diagram of a book he had recently finished. The point of the plot diagram was to get him to think about the story elements and how they related to one another. The teacher’s goal was to encourage her students to think of novels as having structure, but the teacher thought that it would be useful to integrate art into this project, so she asked her students to draw pictures to represent the plot elements. That meant that my nephew thought very little about the relation between different plot elements and a great deal about how to draw a good castle.
Now you may be thinking, “OK, so cognitive psychologists can explain why students have to think about what material means—but I really already knew they should think about that. Can you tell me how to make sure that students think about meaning?”
When we think of good teachers, we tend to focus on personality and on the way the teachers present themselves. But that’s only half of good teaching. The jokes, the stories, and the warm manner all generate goodwill and get students to pay attention. But then how do we make sure they think about meaning? That is where the second property of being a good teacher comes in—organizing the ideas in a lesson plan in a coherent way so that students will understand and remember.
The human mind seems exquisitely tuned to understand and remember stories—so much so that psychologists sometimes refer to stories as “psychologically privileged,” meaning that they are treated differently in memory than other types of material. I’m going to suggest that organizing a lesson plan like a story is an effective way to help students comprehend and remember.
Before we can talk about how a story structure could apply to a classroom, we must go over what a story structure’s four principles, often summarized as the four Cs. The first C is causality, which means that events are causally related to one another. The second C is conflict. A story has a main character who is pursuing a goal but is unable to reach that goal. The third C is complications. The final C is character. A good story is built around strong, interesting characters, and the key to those qualities is action.
Using a story structure brings three important advantages. First, stories are easy to comprehend, because the audience knows the structure, which helps to interpret the action.
Second, stories are interesting. Reading researchers have conducted experiments in which people read lots of different types of material and rate each for how interesting it is. Stories are consistently rated as more interesting than other formats (for example, expository prose), even if the same information is presented.
Third, stories are easy to remember.
Structure your lessons the way stories are structured, using the four Cs: causality, conflict, complications, and character. This doesn’t mean you must do most of the talking. Small-group work or projects or any other method may be used. The story structure applies to the way you organize the material that you encourage your students to think about, not to the methods you use to teach the material.
For my teaching, I think of it this way: the material I want students to learn is actually the answer to a question. I sometimes feel that we, as teachers, are so focused on getting to the answer, we spend insufficient time making sure that students understand the question and appreciate its significance. To us, the question and its importance are obvious. To them, they aren’t.
Thinking about meaning helps memory. How can teachers ensure that students think about meaning in the classroom? Here are some practical suggestions.
Learning is influenced by many factors, but one factor trumps the others: students remember what they think about.
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