Strategies for teaching Remembering
General principles
- It is important that students understand each strategy, why it aids memory and when they can apply is.
- Students should be explicitly taught how to use each strategy through direct instruction and teacher modelling.
- Students should be asked to use a specific strategy for a task, and should then be required to reflect on how it worked for them.
Teach students to attend to details
- Heightened attention makes information ‘stand out' in the brain. Verbal cues (such as "The three key factors…") and visual cues (such as colours, bold letters, etc) prompt heightened attention.
Provide Repetition, Rehearsal and Review
- This can be done through verbal rehearsal, copying material (which combines visual and motor rehearsal), revising visual representations of the information, kinaesthetic rehearsal (e.g. tapping on numerals to reinforce learning of addition facts). Different rehearsal modalities will be more useful for different students.
Attaching Meaning
- Provide a framework or background knowledge to which students can attach new meaning/information. This provides a more complex system of cognitive connections, which improves information recall.
- This can be done by using verbal or visual associations, acronyms, acrostics, or rhymes to make it meaningful.
- Timelines, information maps, webs, and charts also help students to organise information and create associations.
Chunking information
- Chunking involves combining ideas or items into fewer units. This helps students to store and retrieve information.
- Chunks can be visual or verbal.
Strategies for specific activities and curriculum areas
Use mnemonics. The use of mnemonics is among the most effective strategies for improving memory for factual information. These can include key words, acronyms, acrostics, visuals and ‘crazy phrases'. ‘Crazy phrases' are made-up wacky sentences to help you remember particular information in a specific order. The first letter of each word correlates with the first letter of each step in the sequence.