When I first qualified as a teacher in 2011, I thought I knew how to teach and get my students to learn new information and skills. Yet often, when my students were tested at the end of a unit, the skills that they had been taught and the information they had learned had clearly been forgotten. Why couldn’t they remember what they had understood just a few weeks earlier?
German Psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus studied memory in the 1800s and created a “forgetting curve” that explained what happens to new information learned over a period of time. He found that humans quickly forget new information. He called this the “curve of forgetting” which first declines rapidly, then more slowly with time.
This poses a problem for students who need to retain information and skills to succeed.
But there are strategies we can use to stop out students from forgetting.
Make Material Meaningful to Students
As teachers, we believe that everything we teach is important and necessary. However, our students might not share this view. We can make our students’ learning more meaningful and memorable by creating songs, rhymes, mnemonics and stories about what we teach. Let’s look more closely at these.
Songs and rhymes contain words that sound alike and have lots of repetition. For these reasons, they can be remembered easily. Some songs already exist for teachers with access to the internet in classrooms like French songs (type into YouTube ‘French Months of the Year Song’).
Or, you could have fun in lessons getting students to construct their own rhyming poem, verse or song to a well-known tune using information learned in class to aid memory.
Mnemonics are patterns of letters or words that help to aid memory, for example: My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Up Noodles for the planets of our solar system in order from the sun (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune). They are useful as they make use of the brain’s natural ability to remember patterns, images and associations.
Stories can also be an effective tool in the fight against forgetting. For example, if you were teaching students about elements of the periodic table, you might get them to construct a story in which the elements become characters that resemble their elemental traits, for example, Gold (Au) radiated light and beauty as she strolled by the river. Lead (Pb) slowly dragged itself behind her, heavy, dense and dull. Meanwhile, Potassium (K), known to her friends as Kay, avoided this route, terrified of the water.
How you could implement in class
The mnemonics are great to give to students at the start of a new topic. You might, for example, tell your students that you’re going to be learning about the solar system and then explain what is meant by a mnemonic. You could then ask them to try to work out what the mnemonic ‘My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Up Noodles’ could be about. Once they have learned what a mnemonic is, and that this one relates to the order to the planets (if they don’t know after some discussion, just tell them), you could then ask them to create their own memorable mnemonic to help them remember their learning in a way that’s personal to them. Students might even feel confident to explain their planetary mnemonic to the class and why they believe it will help them remember planetary order.
Songs, stories and rhymes might be best made use of creatively when the students are at the end of their learning, to consolidate it. If you had taught your lessons on the elements of the periodic table, and some of the accompanying qualities of the elements, students would be able to create characters using these elements which could tell a story. Alternatively, if you were teaching students about different types of rocks, students could demonstrate their knowledge of these by creating a poem using at least one feature of each, Like this:
Three Little Rocks
Sedimentary rocks are layered,
Pressed by time, they’re neatly tailored—
Sand and shells in tight embrace,
Holding stories in their face.
Igneous rocks are born from fire,
From molten lava rising higher.
Cooling fast or cooling slow,
They shine with crystals’ hidden glow.
Metamorphic rocks transform,
Changing shape though staying warm—
Heat and pressure make them new,
A rocky makeover through and through.
Three little rocks beneath our feet,
Each with a tale of earth’s heartbeat.
Look out for the next blog post on ‘Do Now Tasks’ for engagement and retention for more useful ideas.
Like this blog? Let us know in the comments what worked for you!
