Professional Growth - How We Can Help Our Students Remember Stuff

This blog post examines how educators can tackle memory with various instructional strategies. "Forgetting is the brain’s way to trim, prune, and make room for more important information (Nørby, 2015). According to something called the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, as soon as we learn something, forgetting occurs rapidly at first then eventually slows down. To help our students combat this and retain new information/skills, teachers must design activities that provide students with multiple opportunities to revisit concepts/skills in a variety of ways.

• Present information using a variety of formats and modalities
• Include four or five opportunities to review/revisit what they have learned before it is likely to be retained (Chun, & Heo, 2018). 
• Students need opportunities to master concepts/skills and apply them in a variety of contexts.
• Students invest more effort in learning/review tasks when they understand the purpose for them.
• Teachers should visit with students about how the brain/memory works (to both store and retrieve information) and regularly model different strategies to enhance understanding, memory, and retention.