Building Better Students and Teachers, One Post at a Time
by Maya Kareer
Throughout history, research has continued to build on our growing knowledge base of memory, but its applications in the classroom are really coming to the surface with the growing presence of inclusive education research, using new technological and scientific tools. It is more important than ever for educators to have an understanding of these tools in order to be successful at implementing them into instructional settings, where they deem fit, to create strong, more resilient students. During my research, I have analyzed the way memory can be utilized in the classroom, tips for students in their studies, and tips for teachers to keep in mind, to encourage their students. I have found that the understanding of memory is central to students’ ability to study effectively, learn in the social environments that classrooms are, and critically think about the world around them.
When beginning my journey as an educational consultant, focusing on psychology’s takeaways, I have come across the various conclusions determined by others in my field long ago. One of the most intriguing ideas from my original exploration was the work of George Miller, on the capacity of working memory. He was a keen and skeptical American psychologist, who determined that we as humans can keep approximately seven pieces of information in our heads, plus or minus two. He also emphasized the importance and benefit of categorizing smaller pieces of information, to support memory, and found that about three to four clusters of information can be internalized as well.
Using this information, I made my first step of my travels to a local elementary school for a workshop with some teachers in a grammar department. Some of the teachers were complaining that they could not get their young students to focus on an assignment or topic for very long, and often the student would forget what parts of speech they had just said or taught. I decided to pass along a few of my most important tips in order to help them out:
1. Try to emphasize the connections between different pieces of information, as the brain can only focus on these seven.
2. In order to get more out of one’s working memory, they should instead structure lessons that cluster information into categories, since the brain can remember three to four clusters of information.
3. Finally, they should utilize more active recall strategies, after shortened lesson plans that have interactive exit-ticket activities, to zero in on the main takeaways or pieces of information that the students should have retained.
After passing this information along, I hoped that the department would report back to me with positive insights about their experiences, in the future.
Later that month, I was struck by the immense support I have received from my first intervention, that I was asked to sit in on a writing workshop for high school students, about memory shaping their personality and identity. In the workshop, many students were asked about certain memories that stuck out to them in their childhoods, and narrated why they were so impactful for understanding themselves to this day. One student’s story really resonated with me, as it was about her experience as a babysitter in her neighborhood. I decided to sit and talk with her that day, allowing her to share her experience more.
Through interviewing this student, I learned about her many fond memories as a babysitter, and how she was always asked by parents in her neighborhood to babysit. Although she said that she did not specifically remember all of the responsibilities that she had, she has been able to apply this information to better her position as a leader in student council, a day-care worker, and a tutor, as a way of being able to interact with the world in a new light.
Because of all of the important care-taking and leadership skills that she gained, she was able to draw on her memories as a form of history, telling her about the future, and being able to predict and prevent certain interpersonal outcomes with her peers and her current tutees, in the present. She can attest to the psychologists Donna Addis and Daniel Schacters’ points that memory is a mechanism for not only looking back on one’s past, but for using it as a future predictor.
During the following school year, I was now asked to work with school counselors and psychologists on helping struggling students, especially ones who were overwhelmed with anxiety or stress, which was affecting their classroom performance. Many of the students were struggling with a kind of test anxiety, and felt that it was significantly impairing their memory, during their actual test-taking times, resulting in them earning lower scores. During their tests, these students described their stress as feeling like extreme panic, with their hearts beating really fast, scared about failing or not doing well in the class. Analyzing their reactions and the negative consequences, I decided to spend some more time working with the school counselors on developing potential strategies that could be used by the students, along with what these feelings were a result of, scientifically.
Through my work on stress, I have come to realize that today’s stress and anxiety has evolutionary roots, making it still presented today as a means of surviving short-term threats, in the same way that it would respond to long-term threats. A response is characterized by glucocorticoids being released, as a way of gathering the body’s energy sources up, and creating this fight or flight response, feeling like panic. Then, when glucose is mobilized in the bloodstream as energy, it helps the brain form quick cellular connections, which is necessary for long-term potentiation. This can be useful for memory formation for certain parts of an event, but overall, stress can be beneficial to an extent. I also described the Yerkes-Dodson Law principle to the school counselors, about how you need a certain amount of arousal, stress, or pressure, to achieve the best performance, in an inverted “U” shape. By telling the school counselors this information about completing complex learning tasks, I hope to explain to them that tests can feel extremely stressful for students, but what they can focus on is helping the students meditate or de-stress, before and after the tests. With this information, they decided to use some of their office’s funding on stress balls, journals, healthy snacks and drinks, comfortable bean bag chairs, and many other items to create a stress-free corner where students can sign up to be in, whenever they feel the need. They were told that it can also be used as a quiet study place before any upcoming exam.
With this in mind, some of the students who were seeing their school counselors were asking about not only how to eliminate the stress of the exam, but how to study better so they are not as stressed to begin with. Just simply attending class can help on tests, especially because it is important to inquire about the format of an exam, to match your studying with how you will be tested, but afterwards, it is important to use very effective strategies for deep encoding. To understand this, I decided to do a talk that was organized through the counseling center, discussing the memory cycle and how to maximize its benefits. Here I highlight some of my main tips to increase studying memory:
1. Encoding: You must focus, organize, internalize, and connect the information you are studying, to make it relevant and distinct to you.
2. Storage: It is always better to space out your studying, between sleep, exercise, and other healthy habits, and studying before bed can be a good way to reinforce the recently tagged memories in your mind.
3. Retrieval: When studying, it is helpful to maintain a similar context to the actual test, by relaxing and breathing calmly, and you should not try to generate every possible answer when you get stuck.
After my talk, teachers were then asking how they can better structure their daily lesson plans, to facilitate better learning and memory when their students are studying. I focused on the importance of making each and every lesson significant for the students, and varying different teaching and recall strategies to make learning more fun and engaging. I have found that the most emotional, surprising, or personally important ideas are remembered best. It is also sometimes nice for students to have a structural framework to go off of each day, allowing them to develop schemas for the way a class is structured, and how the information will be presented. Overall, I think it was very helpful for the teachers to know that they can definitely try many new and creative approaches to teaching different concepts in the classroom.
At this point, midterm season was coming up for the local colleges in my area, and I wanted to take some time to give back to the college communities that helped me, and provide more resources to individual students. For many students, exam season was a collaborative one, and through the use of study groups, students were able to feel less stressed about learning, memorizing, and applying such large quantities of information, in various subjects. I did very much want to help the students build strong study groups, however I wanted to ensure that I cautioned them against relying too heavily on their peers, up until the day of an exam.
One of the students that I worked with was studying for a very large philosophy exam that was worth about a third of her semester grade, and she was extremely overwhelmed by the depth and breadth of knowledge she was expected to be able to display on the exam. I told her that in this case, study groups can prove to be helpful, as other students can assist in holding them accountable. They could all engage in frequent studying, slowly spacing it out over weeks and months, to see if they are all able to retrieve more information. Here, she did not feel as obliged to cram, and the philosophical discussions that she had with her peers had been very effective for reducing her stress level during deep understanding tasks, and for making the course content more relevant and distinctive, in her brain.
On another hand, one of the other students I instructed was studying for a big biology exam that required a great deal of memorization. She often felt that in her study groups, she was falling behind, and was unsure how much of the information shared with the group was actually internalized by her. I then decided to explain more about this collaborative inhibition effect to her, and how when engaging in this joint studying method, less can be recalled later on, as each group member feels they have less responsibility in remembering. Because of this, their memory can be overestimated by the solid group memory, and retrieval cues for the group may vary among individuals, making students feel much more confident during the test, than they truly should. With this in mind, study groups can sometimes be a great destressing source to talk ideas out, but should not be relied on in terms of memorization principles.
Looking back at my recent work, I am grateful to have been able to help so many teachers, students, and counselors in their everyday, academic lives, but I have now been raised with new burning questions to address in my later studies of memory. How can all that we know shape educational policy, and the way we assess? How can practice inform principles in the classroom, and in our ever-changing world? This process is a slow one, but we can say for sure that learning throughout our lives would not be the same without our memory.