Hello! And welcome to another weekly update on memory and metacognition. If you're new to this newsletter, please take a look at the previous editions.
This time, I want to touch back on something that I said last week:
"Whether we focus on skills, facts or concept knowledge, memory is always playing a role."
To me, this point relates to one of the biggest misconceptions about memory among educators: a lot of people seem to feel that it is only about factual knowledge.
Worse – some appear to feel that advocating for the importance of professional understanding of memory means promoting a memorisation-based style of teaching, with understanding and skills falling by the wayside.
That is certainly not what I want to see, and it doesn't reflect my own practice!
I think that memory, and in particular long-term memory, fundamentally underpins all aspects of learning.
When you think about:
developing higher-order skills like analysis isn't going to help if we can't retain those skills over the long-term.
using any skill, from reading to driving a car, involves retrieving things that have been stored in memory (facts, rules of the road, etc)
even a broad philosophical conversation that makes you rethink your views and opinions must somehow be retained. Otherwise we'd have the same conversation over again, kind of like Dory in the Pixar movies.
Overall, then, I feel that memory is playing a much greater role in education than is sometimes realised. A role that is certainly not confined to cramming for exams.
Read more about this idea in an open-access article that I wrote for Chartered College of Teaching. It's aimed at NQTs, but I think it gets into some interesting issues:
Is it all just memorisation? : My College — my.chartered.college
As a memory researcher and teacher-educator, I sometimes get a negative reaction when I talk about improving teachers’ understanding of human memory. Am I suggesting that school learning is just a matter of memory? And isn’t memorisation a bad thing?…
By the way, if you need APA-style references to any of my articles, you can find a list of my publications and talks right here.
Recommended read
Last time I recommended a recent study of the spacing effect, a concept which I'll return to in another update soon. Today, in line with better understand how memory plays a role throughout learning, I'd like to draw your attention to this brilliant explanation of schemas:
A Complete Guide to Schema Theory and its Role in Education by Becton Loveless.
I don't know much about the author or website, but the article does a great job of explaining this in a lot of depth while remaining accessible. It summarises the key classic psychology research, and also links it to modern learning science concepts including dual coding and metacognition.
I'd be interested to know your thoughts, too – does this fit with how you understand schemas, and how you think they are usually explained to new teachers?
That's all for now – thanks for being a part of this community!
Jonathan
Website: https://www.jonathanfirth.co.uk/
Last week: Interleaving Chat
Next week: Memory Illusions
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