Hello – I hope you are well. Spring is in the air, and perhaps a holiday is not too far away for many of us!
As I mentioned last time, I appeared on a podcast with Nasima Riazat, co-author of What Teachers Need to Know about Memory, and explored the question of what a new teacher needs to know about memory (check out the podcast: Beyond Survival).
Last time I shared my initial thoughts, and today I’ll continue with my response.
4: There’s a Key Difference Between Learning and Performance
Following on directly from the explanation of memory and forgetting (you can find those points in my previous post), I would aim to clarify the concepts that researchers call learning vs. performance.
This is an area where intuition is likely to be flawed – new teachers may assume that a class has ‘learned’ something when they get answers right at the end of a lesson. But this is really just performance.
The idea of performance links neatly back to my earlier point about forgetting being rapid. Can we say something has been learned if students will have largely forgotten it within a few days or weeks?
5: The Role of WM and LTM
Distinguishing WM and LTM is important too, partly because everyday ideas about short-term memory differ from the way the term is used by psychologists. It’s easy for teachers to mix up this distinction with learning vs. performance, so tackling these ideas fairly close together would be helpful.
New teachers need to understand that WM carries out processing in the here and now. It is engaged whenever their students do tasks of pretty much any type, and is a very brief store – information fades within seconds.
I’d certainly also want to emphasise the very limited number of items it can hold. A more detailed exploration of the system could come later.
6: Desirable Difficulties
The last big idea I’d want to tackle is the concept of desirable difficulties. I’d explain how important it is to make practice challenging for students, doing it in ways that resemble real-world recall and use. Repetitive, short-term and predictable practice are commonplace in classrooms, but much less valuable.
Two desirable difficulties that new teachers seem to take to quite quickly and easily are retrieval practice and the spacing effect.
I would also mention variation – the idea that the more varied our practice is, the more durable and transferable a memory will become.
Naturally, there are so many more things that can be said about memory, from the use of mnemonics to the way memory strategies can be applied in everyday tasks. However, I think the things I’ve mentioned in the last two posts would really set new teachers up well for further exploration and deepening of their knowledge.
Hope you have a great week!
Jonathan
Last week: Need to Know About Memory: Explored (pt. 1)
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