Helping Students Remember

This week’s article summary is The Best Way to Help Children Remember? Not Through 'Memorable Experiences'.

For me, this article was extremely interesting and provocative in explaining the two primary ways we store memories.

Episodic memory results from big emotional events. We all have vivid memories of important events in our lives. Think of your earliest memories; chances are they involve unique events like a birthday party, first date, an important rite of passage, etc. Typically strong emotions are attached to these memories—be it happiness, disappointment, or anger.

Semantic memory, on the other hand, is stored in long-term memory through metacognition—thinking about thinking. These memories rarely include strong emotions. All the skills, concepts, procedures we have in our brain have been learned from practice, repetition, testing. Some examples of semantic memories I have are the Magna Carta was signed in 1215, the word ‘occasion’ is spelled with two c’s, and 8 x 8 is 64. I don’t have any episodic memories about learning them; rather I learned them from studying and thinking about them.

What does this mean for us as teachers?

Because episodic memories are so vivid, we often think that they are more effective than semantic. But the reality is we have many more semantic memories than episodic ones. We may not remember all the studying, reviewing, and test-taking we did in school, but it’s those semantic experiences that make up the bulk of our learning, memory, and knowledge.

Hence, in the classroom we need to make sure we provide students ample opportunities to think about their thinking (practice metacognition). Kids need to be reminded about what they need to think about and what they are learning. Yes, we remember emotional events in our lives but, as the article relates, it’s semantic not episodic memories we use to transfer knowledge and apply it to think critically and creatively.

We all enjoy fun-filled and exciting projects and activities—and students will remember the joy and fun of doing them--yet these memories are typically cued to the context of that specific  experience and hence often can’t be recalled or utilized in a new situation.

It's ironic but it’s the humdrum routines of school that have the most impact on our learning.

Joe

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When we look back on our own school days, our strongest memories are probably a mix of big occasions—field trips, plays, and sports days alongside more personal events tinged with strong emotion. Things that happened that were really funny or sad, or that made us feel excited, interested, exhilarated, or angry.

We don’t tend to remember vividly, if at all, actually learning the substance of math or English classes. We might remember amusing anecdotes from lessons gone awry, or still bristle at past injustices.

All of which leads to us making the entirely reasonable hypothesis that if we want students to remember what we teach them, then we need to make our lessons more like the spectacular one-off special events. Memorable events, in this view, should form the template for creating memorable lessons.

As reasonable as this seems, this is a myth. It is a myth because human memory works in two different ways, both equally valid but one of which is much better at enabling us to transfer what we have learned to new contexts. This transfer is an essential prerequisite for creativity and critical thinking.

The two forms of memory are known as episodic and semantic memory.

Episodic memory is the memory of the ‘episodes’ of our life—our autobiographical memory. This takes no effort on our part, it simply happens. Episodic memory is “easy come, easy go.” If you try to remember what you had for lunch yesterday, you will probably remember. If you try to remember what you had for lunch a year ago today, you will have no idea.

Semantic memory, on the other hand, involves much harder work. We have to expend effort to create semantic memories. This is the kind of memory we use when we consciously study something because we want to remember it. Unlike episodic memory, it does not just happen. The upside, however, is that the effort involved results in a long lasting memory.

Emotional and sensory cues are triggered when we try and retrieve an episodic memory. The problem is that sometimes students remember the contextual tags but not the actual learning. It has serious limitations in terms of its usefulness as the main strategy for educating children. This kind of memory does not make for flexible, transferable learning that can be brought to bear in different contexts and circumstances. Yet it is this transferability that is the essential prerequisite for creativity and critical thinking.

Semantic memories are context free. Once a concept has been stored in the semantic memory, it is more flexible and transferable between different contexts. Semantic memory is central, therefore, to long-term learning.

This explains the frustration teachers feel at the beginning of each school year when children they have been assured are very competent appear to have absolutely no clue. It is not that their previous teacher was deluded when they said they understood fractions. It was that the previous teacher had not realized that this understanding was not yet secure in semantic memory and was still highly reliant on episodic memory. It was therefore highly dependent on strong contextual cues to be remembered. Move the child to a different classroom, with a different teacher, sitting next to different classmates, and, without the familiar context, the learning simply cannot be recalled.

Forming semantic memories requires work and practice. Unlike episodic memories, they don’t just happen. If you want to remember something, you need to think about it, not just experience it. Memory is the residue of thought—the more you have thought about something, the more likely it is that you will remember it.

So teachers have to make sure that lessons give students the opportunity to think about the message of the lesson, rather than the medium we use to teach it. This is where “fun” lessons can unintentionally prevent learning happening.

When teachers plan lessons, we need to be mindful of what children will be thinking about during each part of the lesson, rather than what they will be feeling or doing. Have we planned activities that will ensure children think hard about the right things? If not, don’t be surprised when children remember very little beyond the confines of that specific lesson.

Unless teachers plan opportunities to revisit concepts again later, some time removed from recent teaching of the concept, it is likely that semantic memory will not yet be strong enough to do the job we need it to do. We need to multiply the opportunities pupils have to think hard about the important things we want them to learn. Are we giving students opportunities to think about concepts in a less highly cued environment?

It is not uncommon for people to disagree with this emphasis on building semantic memory. Sometimes people argue “but I don’t remember anything I learned at school.” When people say this, what they usually mean is “I don’t have strong episodic memories of learning specific things at school.” This is actually a good thing for which they should be grateful. Much of what we learned at school we don’t remember learning, and yet we know it. This is because the episodic memory of the actual lesson has long since faded, while the semantic memory formed through thinking hard about the content endures.

Strong emotion makes things stick in episodic memory, as does novelty. So doing some sort of less routine, novel or exciting event to round off learning about something might complement semantic memory—a trip at the end of a topic of work for example. Returning to the early example of teaching angle using water pistols, maybe doing this after a series of more traditional lessons might be a good way of reaping the benefits of both forms of memory, as might be doing that science experiment that proves the concept you have been learning about. It is not a simple binary choice between always only doing one or the other. Nor is it the case that episodic memory is in some way “bad” or inferior. It’s just different. The deliberate building of semantic memory is much more likely to result in long lasting, flexible and transferable memory than putting most of your energies into the episodic basket, so should form the bulk of what we spend our time on. But not every moment of every day. Knowing the limitations of both forms of memory can help us make wiser and more productive choices.