1. Chapter 6 talks about the memory strategies that adults use such as the key word method, the method of loci, and mnemonic strategies such as chunking, hierarchy, first letter technique, and the narrative technique. It also talks about metacognition and metamemory which are your knowledge of you cognitive abilities and how you learn. Chapter 13 basically examines the differences in age groups and the memory strategies used in each of the groups. It also talks about metacognition from young children to older adults.
2. It fits in with what we have learned with working and long term memory because we are able to access what works for us individually in order to take the info from working into long term memory and then be able to retrieve the info when needed.
3. I though that it was very interesting to read about the research that was done on infants and young children. Would it help people to learn and retain more info in the future if we taught them memory strategies at 2 - 4 years old? Would this age of children be able to understand the memory strategies if we worked on it? Children are like sponges, I wonder if this would make a difference. The government has been putting a great deal of money towards preschool programs so I guess we will see the results down the road.
4. I don't believe that all of my high school students understand their study strategies. I think that they sometimes continue to do the same strategy without trying others. I think that this also depends on the level of motivation that the students have. I talk to students before their math tests about the way that they can study. For example, I tell them to practice the concepts that they are having trouble with. The book talks about this in chapter 13. I don't think that this age of students really understand their own cognitive abilities and strengths (Metacognition). I also talk to the students before taking state tests like the ACT. We talk about strategies to take multiple choice tests. In my last blog, I talked about offering a study skills class to students that are at-risk. We do not always have time to talk about study strategies with the other curriculum that we have to cover but it is something that would definitely benefit the students.
5. There are several studies that the author has done on college students. I think that it would have been interesting to study young adolescents also. Chapter 13 seems like it only studied infants, young children, children between 6-9, college students, and elderly people. They skipped the ages of 11-18 and adults between 25 and 65. It would be interesting to see this research also. I thought the reasearch with infants would have been more interesting if they looked at the difference between premature babies and babies that went full term.
6. It is important to learn the memory strategies that help us to individually learn. As teachers I think that we should put emphasis on this when we have extra classtime because it can make a positive impact on student achievement.
7. As I mentioned earlier, I think that a study skills class would benefit students for the future. I think that the freshman level in high school is a critical time because of the adjustment to high school. By understanding their metacognition skills and trying different memory strategies could benefit them for the rest of their high school years and would make them more successful in the future in any avenue that they decide to pursue.
8. It is interesting that the studies have not included high school students. I think that if we can educate teachers in middle school and high school to talk to their students about memory strategies and metacognition we would be more successful and maybe we would see huge improvements on assessments and the level that the students can recall concepts that they have learned.
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I too thought it would have been a little more insightful if we had been exposed to studies that represented a wider range of ages. My daughter struggled greatly when she started high school. She has always had trouble taking tests. Her high school offered a study skills class and she went to it for a brief while but it was secretly pegged as the class for "struggling" students. When people made fun of her she opted to not go back!
ReplyDeleteYou are right, more needs to be done to to help students improve upon their study habits and ways to encode needed information. Here is a link to a book that I started to look at. Chapter 6 goes into different age groups of children that were studied. I have to admit, I have not looked at it in detail yet (working on the workshop and aciton research). Maybe over Spring Break!http://books.google.com/books?id=EgPzi4FhUzMC&pg=PA129&lpg=PA129&dq=children+metamemory&source=bl&ots=H8URuheIqU&sig=Vd5w5GZ2-K4fmPPowMA913deINc&hl=en&ei=BVGbSYmhLozQMfHcyPQL&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=6&ct=result#PPR7,M1
Perhaps its not that children are sponges at young ages, but rather they have this overwhelming intrinsic motivation of curiosity. Its that special age where they "want to learn" for themselves, not because its part of a curriculum and the teacher says its important.
ReplyDeleteAlso, preschool programs have shown to account for the vast differences in student's success rates and their performances on standardized testing at the third grade level.
I though that it was very interesting to read about the research that was done on infants and young children. Would it help people to learn and retain more info in the future if we taught them memory strategies at 2 - 4 years old? Would this age of children be able to understand the memory strategies if we worked on it? Children are like sponges, I wonder if this would make a difference. The government has been putting a great deal of money towards preschool programs so I guess we will see the results down the road.
ReplyDeleteIn a "classic study", Myers and Perlmutter, the author mention, 2-year old children recalled only 20%. It might be possible to build to the 20% but when we look at childhood amnesia, children do not recall events that occurred in their lives before 3 years old, they might not recall the strategies trained. what if it is an ongoing training through middle school, it might be practical.
In regards to your comment on my blog and it coincides with your blog, I believe the ages of 2-4 is a good time to begin teaching kids to sort and classify info into their memory. I believe preschool and kindergarten teachers already do that when they have them sort colors, sort plastic game pieces, etc. They have them complete the activity, but they do not tell them why they are doing so which defeats the purpose of the activity. When kids are not told why they are doing something, they do it to complete the activity and no longer think about it again. What needs to happen to change that is teachers and parents need to teach their children why they are doing so. But, honestly, it never occurred to me until this class that the way we classify and encode info helps our long term memory for recall. We need to begin educating others that there is a purpose to sorting info and there is a method and reason behind memory strategies. When we do that, teachers can explicitly explain to kids (at a way they can understand) why they are doing what they are doing and how they could apply it in another situation. It must be continual though in order to make it a habit. If we begin introducing it to them at that age, they are capable of absorbing the info and practicing and then they can continue to add to it in elementary and have it well developed in high school. Maybe then we could form a better problem solving society that can better recall info rather than the info staying in working memory and being gone after a bit of time. I don't know if this is correct, but this is just what I am beginning to find might help those with low memory. If we combat it early, there could be hope!
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