What we remember is key to what we learn, and it’s a truism to say that if we can’t remember a thing we probably haven’t ‘learned’ it, because information is inert – it isn’t ‘learning’ until we own it in our brain. Remembering information we have previously met – recall – is key to learning; maybe it is learning. So how can we best ensure that we can recall what we need to, just when we need to?
By making solid memories that we can easily retrieve later when we want to/need to. But how do we do that?
In two ways: first, by doing good things to get the key information into our long-term memory; and second, by doing good things to keep that information fresh in our memory over time. Again obvious, but how to achieve those two things?
Committing information to long-term memory in the first place…
Is about forcing our brain to think carefully about the information at the point when we are studying it – and the best way to force ourselves to think about information is by using good questions. For example:
Read the information and ask questions about it as we go. I read this sentence: The Eiffel Tower in Paris was designed by Gustave Eiffel and built for the 1889 ‘Exposition Universelle’ (a kind of large fair), to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution.
That sentence brings to my mind these three questions: 1. Why does the Eiffel Tower have that name? 2. When was the Eiffel Tower built? 3. Why was it built?
Those three questions force me to think about the key information in the sentence about the Eiffel Tower. I can’t hide – either I can answer the questions or I can’t. If I can’t, I must go back to the original sentence and find the answers; doing that will fill in my knowledge gap immediately.
Using good questions, then, is key to remembering key information. But that’s immediate recall – we forget stuff, what about six months or a year later?
How do we keep information fresh in our memory over time?
By using those same questions to force ourselves to retrieve the information over time: that is, by doing retrieval practice. What does that look like in practice? We need to build a bank of good questions as we go. For example, there might be 300 good questions that we need to know the answers to in order to do well in GCSE Biology (I’m making that number up). 300 is a scary number, but we begin with 5 at the start of the course, it grows to 10, 10 becomes 20, 20 becomes 50 and so on; and all the while we are practising retrieval of the information we have met by going back over the key questions and filling our knowledge gaps. Yes, it’s time-consuming and it requires discipline and good habits – who said learning was easy?
Going back to GCSE biology: imagine a group of students who have the answers to the key 300 key Biology questions fresh in their minds as they sit down to do the Biology exam papers in June of Year 11. Imagine how good those students will feel; the confidence they will have. Okay, there’s also the application of knowledge, which requires more than the knowledge itself; and sometimes exam questions are phrased awkwardly – there are no certainties – but you’re an awful lot better off if you sit down to do the exam brimming with a load of key knowledge that has been selected carefully for you by subject experts. Aren’t you?
Well constructed knowledge organisers lend themselves to key questions – which is precisely what the teacher quizzes are about. But do students have those banks of questions that they can use to force themselves to retrieve the key knowledge? If they don’t, can we give the questions to them?
Achieving success in school – and in life too – depends on many variables, some of which can be beyond our control at times. But we can exercise significant control over our success in acquiring key knowledge – by working hard, on the right things, in the right way.
And that means using great questions, and doing retrieval practice over time; filling our memory with the good stuff.
