Remembering Information

The last post ended with this question: “What else is needed (to help us remember information) besides attention?”

Here Willingham examines some reasonable guesses.

The first is “…we remember things that bring about some emotional reaction.” We usually remember events that had emotional content, like birthdays, weddings and the like.

But this does not mean that memory depends on emotion, otherwise we wouldn’t remember much from school (assuming we do).

Perhaps “it’s more accurate to say, things that create an emotional reaction will be better remembered, but emotion is not necessary for learning.”

Next guess: “Repetition is another obvious candidate for what makes learning work.”

However, repetition does not guarantee learning.

When I used to watch the 7th grade boys during chapel I would constantly tell them to open their prayer books so they could sing one of the canticles like the Benedictus es Domine – “Blessed art thou, O Lord God of our fathers…”

Invariably they would tell me they don’t need the prayer book. They would argue that they have the canticle memorized, because they had sung it so many times over so many years. I would say, “That’s fine. Would you be willing to write out the entire canticle for an all or nothing test grade – an A or an F?” They would then open their prayer books. Years of repetition did not guarantee they knew the canticle exactly. So repetition by itself does not guarantee learning.

After giving other examples, Willingham says, “Whatever you think about, that’s what you remember... Therefore, a teacher’s goal should almost always be to get students to think about meaning.”

You notice he doesn’t say the goal is to keep students entertained or on task. If we want our students to learn, we must get the students to think about meaning.

Also, we have to be specific about which aspect of meaning we want the students to remember. “There can be different aspects of meaning for the same material.” For example, take the word piano.

Willingham writes, “In one of my all-time favorite experiments, the researchers led subjects to think of one or another characteristic of words by placing them in sentences – for example, “The moving men lugged the piano up the flight of stairs” or “The professional played the piano with a lush, rich sound.”

The subjects read one of the two sentences and were only to remember the word in bold type. They would later have a memory test about the word.

“The results showed that the subjects’ memories were really good if the hint matched the way they had thought of the piano, but poor if it didn’t.” For those subjects who read the moving man sentence, the cue “something that makes music” didn’t help them remember the word piano.

Therefore “…teachers must design lessons that will ensure that students are thinking about the meaning of the material.” He goes on to give an example of a teacher giving his sixth grade nephew an assignment to draw a plot diagram of a book he had finished reading. The point of the assignment was to show that novels have structure.

The teacher thought incorporating art into the project would be useful (engaging), so she encouraged the students to draw pictures representing the plot elements.

“That meant that my nephew thought very little about the relation between plot elements and a great deal about how to draw a good castle.” Thus the lesson failed to achieve its objective with at least one student.

If our aim is to make the students “think about meaning”, I believe it puts lesson design into a whole new light. How does the lesson cause the student to think about the meaning of what we’re trying to teach, and not just think about doing another worksheet or exercise.

How would we change our presentations if we wanted the students to think and not just do?