Chapter 2, page 47
Problem 2.3 Understanding Students’ Thinking. Identifying students’ memory strategies.
An important skill for teachers to gain is the skill to rapidly and even automatically identify
which strategies your students are using. As teachers become aware of the strategies that
their students are using, they are better prepared to develop plans to help students learn
new strategies that they are not currently using.
Consider the following examples. Which strategies do you see students using in
each scenario?
A. Jessica, a ninth grader studying cell organelles in a biology text says to herself, “I
guess mitochondria are kind of like car engines.”
B. Alden, a fifth grader studying social studies writes: “There are several pretty
important ideas, but I’d say the most important is that the print press started to change
society, because the printing press changed everything.”
C. Isabel, an eleventh grader studying English history explains: “So Henry VIII brought
peace to England. I’ll remember that by imagining about a nation full of peaceful hens,
made peaceful by King HENry.”
D. Shauna, a third grader remembering a list of what to get at the office supplies store
says: “Writing stuff--pens, pencils, paper. Art stuff—construction paper, glue, tape.”
E. Eli, a seventh grader is trying to learn the order of steps in meiosis: “Interphase,
prophase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase, interphase, prophase, metaphase, anaphase,
telophase, interphase, prophase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase, interphase, prophase,
metaphase, anaphase, telophase.”Response:
A. Analogy, an integration strategy, noticing the similarity between engines and
mitochondria. You can also view this as elaboration, as it involves making connections with
prior knowledge. Many integration strategies can be viewed as elaboration in addition to a
more specific strategy such as analogy.
B. Selection—summarizing or choosing a single main idea. Also explanation, as the student
explains why the printing press was the most important invention.
C. Keyword method (peaceful HENS and HENry). Imagery plays a role, too, if the student
tries to vividly imagine the hens.
D. Categorization into two groups—writing material and art materials.
E. Rehearsal (a miserable choice as a memory strategy!)Retrieval
The last process in the information processing model is retrieval. As you have just seen, learners
move information from working memory to LTM by encoding the information. Retrieval is the process of
moving information from LTM back to working memory.
Retrieval is facilitated when students encode information using the encoding strategies presented in
the previous section. One reason for this is that effective encoding creates many connections between old
information and new information, and it is easier to retrieve information when there are multiple
connections to it (Nelson & Hill, 1974; Radvansky, 2005).