Friday, April 13, 2007

Educational Implications

When teachers understand the brain and how it works they can help their students by applying research methods in the classroom and sharing research with colleagues. Teachers who understand the memory processes and how information is influenced in the working memory may be able to help enhance working memory in students. To develop memory skills the teacher should use reflection, recoding, and rehearsal strategies. To establish retention of long-term memories, the teacher should review the important information often. Teachers must get information into long-term memory for students to be able to use the information in their future. The brain processes, stores, and retains information. Teachers can guide students in accessing this information by utilizing their individual learning styles and strengths. Educators can use practical strategies and applications for accessing information learned to carry over into the real world. Students have different needs depending on their learning styles, some students learn best with one and/or maybe all: physical or kinesthetic, social/emotional, visual, verbal, and cognitive. Teachers should incorporate activities to help students realize the best ways to recover information, such as: mind mapping, debating, role playing, mnemonics, metaphors, rhymes, rewriting activities, summarizing, songs, and repetition. They can have students verbalize information in their own words. When students create their own rhymes, songs, or mnemonics it will be more meaningful to them and they will hold it in long term memory better.

Scientists discover new information about how and what the brain learns and how it remembers all the time. You may ask yourself, “How can teachers help their students improve their memory?” The more we understand about the brain, the better we'll be able to educate it. Understanding how memory works provides an advantage for every educator. Teachers are the only professionals in the world who change brains on a daily basis. To encourage learning make things livelier, interesting, add movement to get them up and get them involved, do things to make learning more relevant. Teachers will sculpt children’s brains by teaching new information. Use hands-on activities, concrete learning, or role play to get the pattern in the brain. Illustrate the concepts in your class by concentrating on visual skills. Graphic organizers provide patterns for students, while helping them organize semantic information. Other visual techniques include story webs, charts such as K-W-L, graphs, and timelines. Students can also draw a picture of what they have learned. The brain searches for meaning, if it can’t make sense it drops it. The brain thinks, “Is this information important?” Have students make a list of everything they need in their life. Reading, Math, and Science will not be on their list. Teachers have to make them want it. The more that teachers understand their own memories the better they will be able to understand their students and help them to remember. When children forget something, they don’t beat themselves up about it, “What’s wrong with my brain?” Students don’t think that way.

The brain learns better when interacting with other brains. Students should be begging for vocabulary. Define words in your own words, draw a picture, and review with a game like password. Students could make up word games or question games about important information and play them. Even the students who don’t study or understand still want to win. They look forward to learning the information this way. Our brain is social; it grows more connections with teamwork. Let the students teach each other. The more that students work together the more they will learn.


I attended a workshop on memory taught by Marilee Sprenger. She taught a mnemonic called: You can always remember, If you N.E.V.E.R. F.O.R.G.E.T.
N- Notice, we don’t notice things, students don’t pay attention. 1. Stimulus activates the brain. 2. Disengage current focus, focus on new stimulus. Students don’t know what to focus on. Intention increases retention.
E- Emote, adding emotion, How do I feel about this? Ask students how do you feel about that? Discussion with interaction and they remember more. Retention automatically goes up when we rehearse and share information. Add emotion, music, personalization, storytelling, empathy, debate, role playing, agree/disagree statements. Emotions are contagious. The more positive you are the more control you have over your brain. Emotion is the potion. It can take 24 -28 rehearsals over a three week period to learn new information, if you add emotion they may learn it the first time.
V- Visualize, paint a picture in the mind. A picture in your mind creates a memory you can find.
E- Eat right and exercise. Food for thought: blueberries, broccoli, dark chocolate, nuts, olive oil, pumpkin – 90% of pumpkin DNA is the same as ours, salmon, spinach, tomatoes, and yogurt. Get moving, get blood and oxygen to the brain. Body and brain are yours to train.
R- Rest, The body needs 4 hours to rejuvenate and the brain needs 8 hours to encode memory to store in long term. Primary children need 10-12 hours of sleep each night. Memories go deep when you get enough sleep.
F- Free yourself of stress, emotions spread - you will make students negative if you are negative. Ask them how they feel J, L , because. Lower stress for memory success.
O- Organize, your brain will remember more if it is organized. Find information faster in brain if it is organized into categories. Use acrostics, acronyms, method of loci, chaining, and image name, music, rhyming, spelling mnemonics, and rhymes. Put information in place for a strong memory trace.
R- Rehearsal, working memory brings information into the frontal lobes.
Semantic information is textbook stuff.
Episodic memory is location, where were you when something happened?
In the classroom student looks at the blackboard and then writes the answer, even when information is not there anymore. Tell a story with emotion and they will remember it longer. Procedural memory is muscle movement memory. Rehearsals the way to make memories stay.
G- Guard you brain, students with no screen time until they are three will read better. Make sure children wear their seatbelts and helmets to protect their brains. Avoid some pain protect your brain.
E- Enrich your brain, people automatically lose 1,000 connections and neurons daily. Stretching their reading brains will increase connections and neurons. New directions create new connections.
T- Teach, the average retention rate of what we remember is 90% of what we teach. Share what you know and let your memory grow.

There are many tips inside this mnemonic that can be carried over into the classroom.

Marilee Sprenger said, it is suggested that increasing working memory will raise IQ and achievement in many content areas. Higher achievement in content areas includes the ability to take the information, make connections to prior knowledge, comprehend, and answer questions. There are techniques that increase both working and long-term memory in students. Teachers must be able to get information into short term memory, help students manipulate the information in the working memory, and make connections to place it in the long-term memory. These permanent memories must then be retrievable.

I gave an auditory perceptual test to 14 of my students. I teach a resource classroom that has students who exhibit learning disabilities, speech and language delays, developmental delays, and ADHD. For the study I recorded the principal, myself, a para- professional, a student, and a stranger saying the pledge of allegiance into a tape recorder. The principal of our school says the pledge over the intercom every morning, so all the students have heard her say it 150 times this school year. In the classroom I am the one talking along with the para-professional. The students also talk quite a bit. I thought that the students I was going to test would be very good at identifying the voices they heard. Each student listened to the tape in private. They were told before listening that they were going to hear the pledge out loud five times by the principal, a teacher, a classroom aide, one of the students in Mrs. Davis’ class, and a stranger. Then after I explained, I played one voice at a time, stopped the tape and asked whose voice they heard. 8 students correctly identified the principal, 5 students identified that it was an aide, but only 2 correctly named her, 4 students were able to identify my voice, 10 students identified the student voice as a student but not one of them could say which student it was in our class, 8 students correctly stated that they heard a strangers voice, the rest all thought they heard a teachers voice. I was shocked that the students were not able to recognize voices they heard daily. Applied research methods in the classroom can help us to re-assess and teach for successful learning.

2 comments:

Lisa said...

One important piece of information I will take from this course is that I need to spend more time teaching my students how to study and work on memory strategies. I ask parents to help their children study, but I often find that parents don't seem to know the best ways to study, either. These skills must be taught explicitly in school. I'm glad you have listed so many ways I can use to teach memory strategies to my students.

Ed Psy Topics said...

I think your first sentence tell it all!
If this is what you take with you in the teaching world I am very proud of you!

I also see the proof that you use your knowledge acquired in this course to test and improve your classroom teaching.
Very good performance.
Congratulations on a well done work!