Memory, Retention, and Learning (Sousa Ch. 3)

I guess it is a 'Beautiful Mind'

Implications of Memory on Teaching

Practice makes perfect?

How to have successful practice:

• Guided, independent practice, and feedback
• Unlearning and relearning is challenging p. 105: Practice will not always make perfect if they learn the wrong info
• Practice and rehearsal over time leads to retention

Katie’s scenario: Psychology teacher in school made us have 30% of each test be over old concepts, but we would never know what. For each test, I had to review every concept. To this day, I remember my psych. info better than other subjects because of that repeated exposure

Implications of Memory on Teaching

Daily biological rhythms that affect teaching and learning:

• Circadian rhythms: Many of the body’s functions like temperature, breathing, and digestion are on a daily cycle of peaks and valleys. These cycles are determined by the brain’s exposure to sunlight.
• Implications? p. 107
• Sleep in learning process
• Delayed sleep phase syndrome p. 109

• Teach new info first: do not have time for students to “guess” at new info because students will remember those guesses first. You want that “prime time” to be where you get to the important info
• Prime time 2 is at the end of a lesson. do not give students “down time” at the end. Go through strong learning material--
• Prime time table p. 97: The longer the lesson, the longer the down-time and less effective learning
• Shorter teaching blocks are better p. 97
• Rest between block lesson segments- students do better when they have rest between classes
• Retention varies with teaching method:
• lecture
• visual
• mnemonics
• visual and verbal
• kinesthetic learning
• Practice and teaching others-”whoever explains, learns!”

Quote: “Tell me and I’ll forget, involve me and I’ll learn..”

No one teaching method...You need to use all methods to strongly teach students. Not just one.

Forgetting

Retrieval

• New info: It is important to forget non-essential info to make room for new learning and meaningful experiences
• Past memories: by forgetting non-essential memories, the recall process becomes more efficient
• Implications for teaching: As long as students purposefully re-visit learning throughout the year/years, they will recall it later

• “Calling on those whose hands go up first signals the slower retrievers to stop the retrieval process.
• Rates of learning and retrieval
• Rate of learning does not always correlate to rate of retrieval
• Some think: Slow learner=unable to learn

Intelligence and retrieval

Chunking

Three Primary Views of Intelligence:

• Howard Gardner- An individual’s ability to use a learned skill, create products, or solve problems in a way that is valued by the society of that individual.
• Robert Sternberg- Three patterns of intelligence: analytical, creative, and practical.
• Jeff Hawkins- Human intelligence as being measured by the capacity to remember and predict patterns in the world, including math, language, social situations, and properties of objects.

Confabulation:

• Your brain changes memories each time you think of it and they are transformed. It becomes something that we don’t remember later on

Break learning into manageable pieces: 7+2: You typically cannot remember more than that

Types of Memory

Learning and Retention

“There is almost no long-term retention of cognitive concepts without rehearsal.” p. 93

• Long-Term
• Declarative: Remembering random facts
• Nondeclarative: Riding a bike
• Episodic- Remembering experiences your sixteenth birthday party, falling off a bike
• Semantic- Knowing-The eiffel tower is in paris.
• Emotional- you can remember bits and pieces of an event, as well as a reaction to it.
• Flashbulb- remembering exactly what happened to you during an important specific event (ex: 9/11)

Retention during a learning episode:

Directions: Take out a pencil and paper. When the timer starts, look at the list of ten words below. When the timer sounds, cover the list and write as many of the ten words as you remember.

-

Forming The Memory

Primacy and Recency Effect

Memory, Retention, and Learning

Is there really a manual?

‘Glass Brain’ by Adam Gazzaley and Philip Rosedale

We remember best what comes first, and second best what comes last in a list. Research is given as to why.

Forming The Memory

• Memory is...
• Patterns of neurons firing together from receptor sites on neurons
• When pattern is repeated (reheasal & practice), neighboring neurons fire faster and repeated firing of the pattern binds the neurons together so that if one fires, they all fire.
• Stored in pieces and distributed in sites throughout the cerebrum

"The biarn geos trhguoh pisysacl and cemhiacl cahnges ehch tmie it lreans"

shape

New memory= engram

color

smell

"The goal of learning is not just to acquire knowledge, but to be able to use that knowledge in a variety of different settings" (Sousa p.87)

"The memory should be specially taxed in youth, since it is then that it is strongest and most tenacious. But in choosing the things that should be committed to memory, the utmost care and forethought must be exercised; as lessons well learned in youth are never forgotton" (Arthur Schopenhauer p.82)

Chances are you remebered the first three to five words and the last one to two words, but had difficulty remembering the middle words

12 sec

12 sec.

KEF

LAK

MIL

NIR

VEK

LUN

NEM

BEB

SAR

FIF

1.___

2.___

3.___

4.___

5.___

6.___

7.___

8.___

9.___

10.___