Chapter 2, page 40
Zajchowski, & Evans, 1989). Two prominent ways of selecting information are summarizing and taking
notes. When a person summarizes a text, memory improves in part because the learner is focusing on
what is most important from all the available information. Similarly, a good note taker selects important
information while taking notes instead of writing down everything. Students who take notes learn more
than students who do not take notes, even if they do not study their notes (Kobayashi, 2005). The very act
of selecting what is important helps facilitate memory.
Organization strategies. As shown in Table 2.1, there are a number of organization strategies
that learners use to move information from working memory to LTM (Gaskill & Murphy, 2004;
Schlagmüller & Schneider, 2002). Each of these strategies require learners to rearrange the information in
new ways. By rearranging information in new ways, learners make the new information more memorable.
Learners can use each of these organizing strategies to help them arrange information in different ways so
as to make it easier to remember.
Table 2.1 Organization strategies.
Organizing
strategy
Explanation and examples
Classification Classification involves reorganizing ideas according to categories that the learner selects. For
instance, when asked to learn a list of words (orange goat sun moon mouse apple
broccoli mango star horse lettuce radish), the learner remembers more of them a day
later because she has organized them into categories:
FRUITS: orange apple mango
MAMMALS: goat mouse horse
VEGETABLES: broccoli lettuce radish
HEAVENLY BODIES: sun star moon
Acrostics An acrostic is a sentence in which the first letter of each sentence stands for something that
you want to learn. Examples:
- Every Good Boy Does Fine. These are the names of the musical notes on the lines
in treble clef: EGBDF. - My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas. The first letter of each word
stands for the order of the nine planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.
Acronyms An acronym is a word (or pseudoword), each letter of which stands for something that you
want to learn. Examples: - HOMES. The letters are the first letters of the names of the Great Lakes: Huron,
Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior) - Roy G. Biv. These letters are the first letters of the colors of the rainbow, in order:
red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. - PEMDAS. These are the first letters of the words that show the order in which math
operations should be carried out: parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division,
addition, subtraction.
Rhymes Rhymes are readily remembered organizing tools. Examples: - I before E except after C.
- In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue...
Songs
Songs are another powerful way to organize information. The ABC song, for instance, is a
powerful way to help children learn the letters in the English alphabet.
Outlining or
summarizing
Outlining and summarizing involve selection, but they also involve organization. If you
summarize a long passage, you are likely to be doing more than just selecting what is
important. Similarly, when you outline, you not only select what to put in the outline; you also
classify ideas within headings at different levels of your overall organization.