Why Students Don’t Like School Chapter 3

Why Do Students Remember Everything They See On Television and Forget Everything I Say?

Questions: “What makes something stick in memory, and what is likely to slip away.”…“How does the memory system know what you’ll need to remember later?”

Short Answer: “Your memory system lays its bets this way: If you think about something carefully, you’ll probably have to think about it again, so it should be stored. Thus your memory is not a product of what you want to remember or what you try to remember; it’s a product of what you think about.”

For students this means: “Whatever students think about is what they will remember...The cognitive principle that guides this chapter is: Memory is the residue of thought.”

“To teach well, you should pay careful attention to what an assignment will actually make students think about (not what you hope they will think about), because that is what they will remember.”

The Importance of Memory

Have you ever presented a lesson you thought was clear, well organized and engaging only to find out the next day that all the students remembered was a joke you told or a comment you made about your family? They acted surprised when you reminded them that the objective of yesterday’s lesson was to teach them that one plus one equals two. Why did the students remember your off-hand remarks, rather than the information you wanted them to remember?

It will take a while to get to the answer. Willingham first discusses why we fail to remember things. He refers back to the diagram of the mind:



The environment always has a lot of extraneous information we filter in order to focus – we are usually unaware of it because we are not paying attention to it.

So for information to move from the environment into the long-term memory, it must come into the working memory, where we keep things “in mind.” This is a fancy way of saying, “If you don’t pay attention to something, you can’t learn it.”

A case in point: Most teachers do not remember what we did or talked about at seminar because they were thinking about something else (classroom decorations, class rosters, thinking about how boring the presentation is, or whatever!).

So that’s one reason we don’t remember things.

Sometimes we don’t remember things because the process for bringing information from our long-term memories into our working memories has failed. (Why this happens will be discussed in chapter four.)

Another reason is that information may no longer reside in our long-term memories. Thus the term “fading memories.”

But what about the times we do pay attention, but can’t seem to get the information from our working memories into our long-term memories? Sometimes we struggle with information not sticking.

Then on the other hand, we may be able to retrieve from our long-term memories information from long ago we never intended to learn.

“We all know that students won’t learn if they are not paying attention. What’s more mysterious is why, when they are paying attention, they sometimes learn and sometimes don’t. What else is needed besides attention?”

Stay tuned for the answer.