If we want to remember something, we really ought to think hard about it. ‘We remember what we think about’, says Daniel Willingham; the reason we remember is because it’s thinking about new information – processing it, in more technical language – that shuttles it from our short-term memory to the vast, possibly limitless, store that is our long-term memory. Or does it? Fact is that I thought hard about a whole load of stuff for the three years when I was studying at university, but can I remember any of it now? No, I can’t – or it certainly feels like I can’t. Thinking is essential for learning, but it is not sufficient.
Why not? Daniel Willingham came up with three principles of memory that are relevant to this question*:
1. Memories are formed as ‘the residue of thought’ – as already stated above, we tend to remember what we think about. And:
2. Good ‘cues’ are important for remembering things: ‘Your access to things that are stored in your memory will succeed or fail depending on the quality of the cues. one obvious source of forgetting, then, is poor cues. you haven’t really forgotten—you just can’t retrieve the memory at the moment because you don’t have the right cues.’ And:
3. People tend to overestimate what they can remember – we often think we know more than we do.
Since learning is about making sure that knowledge is both in our long-term memory AND readily available to us when we need it (during a test or an exam, for example), how can we use these three principles of memory to help our students learn well?
The first principle emphasises the importance of the specific activities teachers use to help learners engage with new information. Obviously, we need to design activities that oblige our students to think hard about the information we want them to learn: activities such as asking and answering questions, writing summaries, discussing key points with others, and ‘teaching’ others are typical activities that teachers use to get students to think about new information.
There’s another key point to be made about this first principle: we can’t think hard about something that we know very little about. If, like me, you lack advanced scientific knowledge, try thinking hard about the science behind a supernova. I come from a small place outside Derry in Northern Ireland, called ‘Prehen’ – try thinking hard about where the name ‘Prehen’ comes from (no, it has nothing to do with hens!). The point here is that background knowledge is essential for thinking; without it, thinking is very limited. So, as teachers we have to carefully build students’ background knowledge so they have the tools with which to think, so they can build more knowledge.
The second principle emphasises the importance of effective ‘cues’. Cues are bits of information that are the starting point for retrieving a memory. Questions are the most obvious cues that we can use : ‘What is 5 times 7?’ ‘The capital of France is…? ‘What does exothermic mean?’ These questions can act as cues for us to retrieve key information, which in this case is the answers to the three questions. Images often act as cues, too, which is one reason why images can be very helpful in creating solid memories.
The third principle is about the importance of systematic retrieval practice, the absence of which is, I believe, by far the biggest reason we don’t remember things over time. Going back to my university studies, I feel strongly that I understood a lot of what I was studying at that time, but what I really never did – beyond a bit of desperate cramming pre-exams – was to go over what I was learning; I didn’t retrieve it again and again and there was certainly nothing systematic about my approach. There were two reasons for that: one, I was a bit lazy – more interested in my social life and my sport than my studies – and, two, I had no idea then that systematic retrieval practice was the closest thing we have to a magic learning recipe. We absolutely have to go over our learning, systematically – by which I essentially mean with focus and concentration, at regular intervals – for it to have the best chance of sticking in our long-term memory.
Willingham’s third principle is about something else, too: how can we combat the entirely natural tendency to overestimate what we know? Only by testing ourselves. We can’t hide from a good test. A good test provides us with a forensic examination of what we know, and what we don’t know. If in doubt, test. And if not in doubt, test. And fill in those learning gaps.
One of the biggest questions around learning for school leaders and individual teachers has to be: what is the best system for enabling every learner to systematically retrieve their key learning over time? The answer to that question propels us towards the best recipe for learning, and careful consideration of the question is why, at Hinchingbrooke, we are asking our teachers to construct knowledge organisers, our students to self-quiz and their teachers to quiz them and test them. We are still in the early days of this new system and we will no doubt need to tweak it and tweak it, but it feels like the right approach and I honestly cannot think of a better one at this time.
*Extracted from the article by Daniel Willingham published in the Winter 2008-9 edition of the ‘American Educator’ periodical.
