USING MNEMONICS IN THE CLASSROOM 1
Using Mnemonics In The Classroom
When we think of how busy our lives have become, we all try to look for short cuts that we can use to help make our lives a little bit easier. When I think of trying to remember everything that I need to keep in my memory bank, I also try to think of short cuts or ways that I can keep those things straight in my head. When I teach elementary school aged children I try to teach specific skills in ways that they can understand and then ways that they will remember these skills for future use. When we teach and use mnemonics in the classroom, are we teaching ways that can help our children take those short cuts that are necessary to remember skills or facts that they will need to make their everyday lives easier?
Effective teachers guide students to link new information to other information that they already know and are familiar with. Teachers many times use examples from everyday life to bring in familiar experiences. Educators must take an active role to help our students help remember the material they are taught. Extensive research has been conducted to demonstrate that learning new material is difficult for many students, whether they have been diagnosed with a disability or not. Many researchers feel that mnemonics is one of the most effective ways to help students remember facts that they need to know and use in the classroom as well as throughout their adult lives.
The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate whether or not that mnemonics is a valuable tool to use in the classroom for...
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... young children with a simpler task to examine whether they can produce useful notations and if they are capable of using them.”((Eskitt & Lee 2006) The questioned why many of the younger children did not produced notations, could be found in a study that found children before the age of Grade 4 are not very accurate at predicting their performance for memory task (Flavell, Friedrichs, & Hoyt, 1970; Yussen & Levy, 1975).
The quality of the notations produced by the children was significantly related to their memory performance. It was the students in Grades 5 and 7 who wrote down full notations about the location of the cards and their partners who scored higher by taking fewer turns to win the game. It was determined that the more adequate the notation the more beneficial it is to the students performance.
Levine states that children have two ways in which they organize the information they receive from the world around them. He refers to these methods as sequential ordering and spatial ordering. He defines spatial patterns as, “assembled parts that occupy space and settle on the doorsteps of our minds all at once” (Levine, p.151). Many examples are given of when spatial ordering is prevalent, for instance, when a student draws a map or recognizes the features of a person’s face. Levine defines sequential patterns as information gaining “admission to the minds one bit at a time and in an order that’s meant not to be missed” (Levine, p.151). He says that sequential ordering is used when students try to master a science project or learn a telephone number. Neurologically, Levine states that sequential ordering is carried out on the left side of the brain and spatial ordering is carried out on the right side of the brain. He also makes references to the possibility of childr...
...ad an effect on the children’s performance. Also, most of the children had already participated in the same stud with previous researchers. To further this study, researchers could experiment with children who were not familiar with the dimensional card sorting task and had an equal sample size across gender.
Key pieces in of information in school settings are remembered through rote memorization and intensive studying to solidify a base of knowledge, while rules of the road are intended to be absorbed through experience, life-and-learn encounters, or a once-a-week course taken for at most 6 months and then never tested again.
Results suggest that there are age differences in spatial memory abilities. Children at the ages of 9 and 10 years old had significantly less errors compared with children at a younger age in the reference memory session; however, results also indicate the children at the age of 5 were able to complete a basic spatial memory task with little effort (León, Cimadevilla, & Tascón, 2014). In contrast, children at this young age in the spatial working memory session did not perform as well as the older age groups even at a basic levels. Between ...
Countless times I have run across this form of education. However, I don’t recall ever retaining much information or knowledge when it has been used in a classroom setting. Most times when I have experienced this hindering concept, I have been in a math class. Throughout high school, teachers would relay information, claiming that we would need to memorize an exact formula or equation because we would need to use it in our everyday lives. We, as eager students, would try and memorize these long formulas to the best of our abilities, but we were never given a situation in our everyday life in which we would be needing to use this information. Not once were we taught how to apply this to situations in our outside lives, just that we needed to know it for those
Learning and memory are fascinating. The world could not function without either. They both are used in many different fashions in a wide variety of places. Learning and Memory have been carefully studied by professionals but are also well known and used by the common people on a daily basis. I am one of those common people, a student who is constantly learning and making the most of my memory. Since enrolling in The Psychology of Learning and Memory class I have come to the realization that I encounter situations in my life that exemplify the very concepts I have studied. I have also learned that it is beneficial to apply the lessons learned in class to my everyday life. Positive reinforcement, learned helplessness and serial recall are a few among many of the learning and memory models that have come to action in my life and in my final reflections surrounding the course.
Mastropieri, M. A., Scruggs, T. E. (1991). Teaching students ways to remember. Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books.
In this course I examined past and present theories of how students absorb, process, and retain information, while also being introduced to a variety of instructional strategies. These strategies include incorporating research based Kagan strategies, multiple intelligences, and differentiated instruction into the lesson planning.
Memory failure or forgetting occurs daily in our lives. Simple things, such as forgetting someone’s name, or forgetting to text someone back is very common every day. Forgetting happens to us so much that we have to rely on different ways to help us remember important things such as keeping a daily planner updated or putting important notes and reminders in our phone.
Direct instruction and discovery learning are two very different styles and their effectiveness has been argued extensively. This paper focuses mainly on elementary school students of science and math and the efficacy of each teaching method in those subjects. The paper investigates the effect each has on recall and retention paying attention to the cognitive load imposed upon the learner by each method when applying the concepts in later lessons (Kalyuga, 2011). The rote memorization of math facts like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division shows an edge in effectiveness and efficiency for our youngest learners over discovery learning which seeks to allow students to create their own knowledge. The author looks at testing data
Mnemonics is simply defined as a device that aids in memorizing something. It has a rich history dating back to prehistoric times1. Records have been found from the Greeks in relation to mnemonic devices1. Simonodes of Ceos was a poet who established the mnemonic device of memory by memorizing the seating order of each individual in a banquet hall1. There are many devices of mnemonics. These include music mnemonics, model mnemonics and note organizing mnemonics2. In recent years, mnemonics has been of growing interest in experiments with many scientists and researchers investigating the effects of Mnemonics on certain groups.
Flashcards are a simple, versatile, and effective for learning skills like sounds, letters, historical dates etc. (Maheady & Sainato, 1985). Multiple intelligence theory that suggests appealing all the different learners at some point during class as there are many types of learners out there (Gardner, 2011). There are a significant proportion of learners who tend to more effective in visual learning than others where flashcard learning is the most appropriate. Flash cards impacts
One of my favorite quotes from Stacey Green states, that if we don’t make learning relevant to our students, then they just learn the answer from the test and forget when it is done. (Vaques, Sneider and Comer page 2) When students learn because of memorization and are not engaged and interested in what is taught, the information becomes a victim of your short term memory, where as when it is
The importance of the distinction between rote and meaningful learning becomes obvious when we think of efficiency of the two kinds of learning in terms of retention, or long term memory. It is believed that materials learned by rote are forgotten easily, while meaningfully learned materials are more efficiently retained. In the case of meaningful learning, forgetting takes place in a much more purposeful manner, that is, according to Brown (2000) forgetting is systematic. It is the elimination of unnecessary materials and a clearing of the way for more material to enter the cognitive field.Therefore, one of the problem of student is learning of vocabulary not forget the vocabulary.