WANT TO IMPROVE STUDENT MEMORY? GET 'EM THINKING

Saturday, August 30, 2003

Many carefully planned, well taught, creative lessons are unsuccessful because they get students thinking about irrelevant things.

``Students remember what they think about,'' says cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham in an article appearing in the Summer 2003 issue of American Educator (see aft.org/American_educator on the Web).

He tells of a teacher who had his students bake biscuits as part of a unit on the Underground Railroad, hoping it would lead them to an appreciation of the conditions of the escaping slaves' lives.

``He asked what I thought of the assignment,'' Willingham says, ``and my reply was that his students will remember baking biscuits.''

That is, they spent 30 seconds thinking about how biscuits related to escaped slaves, and 30 minutes thinking about measuring flour and mixing dough.

His practical advice to teachers is, ``Anticipate what your lesson will lead students to think about.''

Willingham, who is an associate professor of cognitive psychology and neuroscience at the University of Virginia, does research on the role of consciousness in learning. He sums it up in the phrase, ``Memory is as thinking does.'' That means, he says, that the most important factor in determining what you remember about new material is what you are thinking about when you encounter it.

Practical applications aside, what intrigues me about this is how anyone would go about doing research on it. In fact there's lots of research, but having been a math major I haven't encountered it before. Or perhaps I was thinking about biscuits at the time.

Anyway, Willingham describes two of the classic examples in this field.

One, done in 1969 by Thomas Hyde and James Jenkins, asked subjects to listen to a list of 24 words. One group of subjects was told to count the number of Es in each word; the others were told to rate whether the word made them think about pleasant or unpleasant things.

Afterward, they were asked to list as many words from the list as they could. (They didn't know that was coming.) The ones who thought about the words' meaning remembered nearly twice as many of the words on the list as those who counted Es.

But here's the real hook (psychologists are sneaky people). The 24 words were actually 12 pairs of closely related words, such as ``doctor-nurse'' (the subjects weren't told that either). The subjects who thought about the words' meaning tended to remember the related terms together, even though they weren't presented that way.

Another experiment separated out the different aspects of meaning by giving subjects a list of words to remember, but in the context of a sentence. Some of them, for example, would see, ``The man lifted the piano,'' while others would see, ``The man tuned the piano.'' The hook here is that for each sentence there was a hint, say, ``something heavy.''

Subjects remembered three times as many words when the hint matched the context.

Returning to practicality, Willingham cautions that ``discovery learning'' must be used very carefully. Yes, it's generally true that people remember things they figure out for themselves better than things they're told. But the things they're told are at least usually correct. And unless the discovery process is highly structured and carefully guided, what students figure out may simply be wrong.

``Students will remember incorrect 'discoveries' just as well as correct ones,'' Willingham notes.

What's more, they may never learn that what they've discovered is incorrect. I remember reading an article about mathematics teaching in which researchers asked children who were struggling in math to describe how they decided whether to add, subtract, multiply or divide. One girl's protocol started, ``Well, if there are a lot of small numbers I add them . . .''

I must have been doing a powerful lot of thinking at the time to have remembered that snippet for nearly 40 years.

Of course one way to ensure that students think about something is to tell them it'll be on the test. Teachers might wish it otherwise, but they can turn that motivation to good use if they can focus students' test preparation on the connections between the various bits of knowledge that they acquire.

It could be quite effective, he suggests, for a history teacher to hand out a list of 30 study questions, along the lines of, ``Describe why the attack on Pearl Harbor was a strategic mistake by Japan, given its war aims.'' If the students know the exam will consist of five essays chosen at random from those 30, they won't be thinking about biscuits when they study.