| |
|
|
Q:
My kids seem to know something one day and forget it the next. It's like
their memories are leaky buckets. They just can't hold onto what they
learn. How can I help them retain things? Brian, San Francisco, CA
Editors’ Note
For an answer to this question, we turned to Frederick J. Brigham (Curry
School of Education, University of Virginia), author of a recent Current
Practice Alert on mnemonic strategies (DLD members can find the Alert
in the Members Only area, plus a detailed Teaching Tutorial on mnemonic
instruction). We appreciate Rick’s compassionate, commonsensical,
and empirically-grounded response. He’s also provided some useful
resources at the end of his comments. The reference for this article
is:
Brigham, F. J. (2002, April 1). Expert connection: Memory.
TeachingLD.org. Retrieved from http://TeachingLD.org/expert_connection/memory.html.
A:
First off, you’re not alone in encountering this problem. I saw it
when I was teaching, too. Probably most people have experienced this problem
once in a while, but students with learning disabilities seem to bump
into it more often than do most people. These problems are frustrating
not only for the student, but also for the teacher.
It’s important to understand that this problem
often is not the result of laziness or simple incompetence. While lack
of effort in learning can lead to the same outcome, some students experience
the problem even though they are working very hard to learn and remember
their schoolwork.
There is substantial evidence that students with learning
disabilities differ from their peers in what the cognitive psychologists
call “working memory.” Their performance on memory tasks—repeating
a series of digits backwards, for one simple example—often is more
similar to younger students than to their age-mates. Not only that, but
some students with LD struggle with knowing what they can do to help themselves
remember things; they don’t know, for example, that it’s helpful
to rehearse something as simple as a phone number in order to help remember
it. Some researchers consider memory problems to be indicative of neurological
abnormalities. Other researchers consider the memory problem to be the
result of deficits in strategies for learning and recalling information.
Regardless of why students with LD have these problems,
it’s important to help them to learn how to remember things. There
are at least half-a-dozen techniques that teachers can use to promote
retention. Here are brief descriptions of a few, followed by some key
resources:
MNEMONICS
Mnemonic instruction refers to instructional or learning strategies designed
specifically to improve memory. In many cases, it refers to modifying
or changing to-be-learned information to link it directly to information
the learner already knows. Use mnemonics to help students encode information
in a more meaningful form and to provide them with a retrieval route at
the time of recall. Mnemonic instruction has been researched in special
education and is associated with the largest effect size found in the
special education literature. Mnemonics were not actually invented; rather,
they were discovered in the repertoires of people who were exceptionally
good at recalling information. Unfortunately, there are no readily available
“off-the-shelf” collections of mnemonic encodings. People interested
in using this technique will need to learn how to do it and then develop
their own mnemonic encodings. Fortunately, there are several resources
available for people who wish to develop mnemonic encodings. I list three
(Brigham & Brigham, 2001; Mastropieri & Scruggs,
1991; and Willoughby & Wood, 1995) at the end of this response.
In addition, in the Members-Only section of this site, Margo Mastropieri
and Tom Scruggs have prepared a Teaching Tutorial with a guide to developing
and implementing mnemonics.
TEACHER ENTHUSIASM
Don’t underestimate the importance of making content interesting
and exciting for students. It is critical that instruction be clear and
unambiguous, but—other things being equal—if a teacher’s
presentation of ideas is lively and engaging, the chances are greater
the students will remember the ideas than if the presentation is dull,
dreary, drab, desultory, and dark. Teacher enthusiasm can have a profound
effect on the students in a given class. In a 1992
paper (Brigham, Scruggs, & Mastropieri), my colleagues and I reported
that teaching enthusiastically yielded twice the achievement and one-third
the behavior problems in the same lessons delivered unenthusiastically
to students with learning disabilities.
EXPERIENCE
Another important strategy for promoting retention of concepts is concrete
experience. Students in school are awash in a sea of words. Most of the
words they hear are delivered to them with the same intensity and in basically
the same environment as the other words that they hear. After a while,
it all becomes somewhat of a muddled soup. When we examined the impact
of reading versus doing in science classes, we found that the students
in lab-type experiences recalled far more of the different kinds of things
that they had studied than when they had simply read about them and discussed
them in class (Scruggs, Mastropieri, Bakken, &
Brigham, 1993). Unfortunately, while the concrete experiences helped
the students remember what they had done, they did not help the students
remember the names of the different science concepts they had demonstrated.
A combination of mnemonic encoding combined with concrete experience seems
to be the best way to proceed when students are expected to recall the
names of the things that they studied as well as specific characteristics
that could be demonstrated through activity-based approaches to instruction.
PRACTICE AND FEEDBACK
Last (but not least), remember that plain, old-fashioned practice is essential.
I don’t mean drill-and-kill kinds of practice (though there is a
place for some of that, too). I mean that rehearsal is important. Athletes,
actors, speakers, and musicians practice their skills over and over again.
If there’s a simple fact answer, asking the student to give that
answer to several questions that vary just a little different from each
other is likely to be helpful. It’s especially important to distribute
this practice over time and situations.
It is also important to give the student feedback
as to how well that he or she is doing in his/her memory work. A number
of my students at the University of Virginia (who are parents of children
with LD themselves) report that the simple and direct feedback that can
be obtained through the kind of charts used in Curriculum-Based Measurement
(CBM) is a major benefit to their children as they work to acquire recall
mastery of things like arithmetic facts, the names of states and their
capitals, and facts from history and science courses. Some researchers
report that CBM measures of content-related vocabulary are among the best
predictors of success in secondary content classes. The 1998
paper by Jones, Southern and Brigham may be helpful for people who
are beginning to use CBM.
Resources
Brigham, F. J. & Brigham, M. M. (2001). Mnemonic instruction. Current
Practice Alerts Issue Number 5. Reston, VA: Division for Learning
Disabilities & Division for Research of the Council for Exceptional
Children.
Brigham, F. J., Scruggs, T. E., & Mastropieri,
M. A. (1992). Teacher enthusiasm in learning disabilities classrooms:
Effects on learning and behavior Learning Disabilities Research and
Practice 7, 68-73.
Jones, E. D., Southern, W. S., & Brigham, F. J.
(1998). Curriculum-based assessment: Testing what is taught and teaching
what is tested. Intervention in School and Clinic, 33, 239-249.
Mastropieri, M. A. & Scruggs, T. E. (1991). ).
Teaching
students ways to remember: Strategies for learning mnemonically.
Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books.
Scruggs, T. E. & Mastropieri, M. A. (2002, March
9). Teaching
tutorial: Mnemonic instruction. TeachingLD. Retrieved from
http://www.TeachingLD.org/
(Available to members of the Division for Learning Disabilities of
the Council for Exceptional Children.)
Scruggs, T.E., Mastropieri, M.A., Bakken, J.P., &
Brigham, F.J. (1993). Reading vs. doing: The relative effects of inquiry-oriented
approaches to science education in special education classrooms. Journal
of Special Education, 27 (1), 1-15.
Willoughby, T. & Wood, E. (1995). Mnemonic strategies.
In E. Wood, V.E. Woloshyn, & T. Willoughby (Eds.) Cognitive
strategy instruction for middle and high schools (pp. 5-17.
Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books.
Back to Expert Connection
|
|
