I think if we can get our players to understand how memory works, it may help them understand how to *learn better*.
Here are 4 things that are worthwhile explaining
It should not be viewed as an event otherwise students may assume:
The benefits of seeing learning as a process means it is viewed long term:
Performance NOW does not = learning.
Why?
Logically we don’t store everything we encounter, otherwise our brains would become too cluttered with ideas and we wouldn’t be able to retrieve the ones we want…
Think of a cupboard full of stuff, you can never find the thing you’re looking for!
Our memories would be useless if we could never access useful knowledge when we needed it. Therefore…it makes sense that the brain triages memories and is willing to let them be forgotten if it doesn’t think they are important.
It’s minimising clutter and making the important stuff more accessible.
Therefore we have to tell our brains when memories aren’t clutter and are important.
We tell them this when we *use* memories i.e. think hard about them (see point 4 below).
Students can choose to let information wash over them passively…
Or…
Players must understand their initial *role* in the learning process is to make connections between the new ideas and their existing knowledge this helps make learning productive.
We need players to be *cognitively active*.
We should help them them make connections between the new ideas and their existing knowledge:
They engage in tasks that cause them to make connections between new ideas and their existing knowledge.
Students need to be motivated to learn in this cognitively active way. An understanding of how this works would go a little way towards achieving this.
…and finally…
Don’t expect to remember things you never return to.
Expect to remember things better when you effortfully think about them.
To stop memories being fragile we need to indicate 2 things:
How do students do this?
We believe that players who understand how their memories work have a better recall.
This article is rewritten based on a series of tweets from Sarah Cottingham – @overpractised