Strategies To Help Students Memories Information

Introduction

A lot of research has shown that most children forget what they have learnt within the shortest possible time. In. This is true for students everywhere, including in Ghana. It creates a major challenge for teachers, who may also find it difficult to break complex information into simple ones due to lack of teaching and learning materials available. 

Even though these problems exit we as teachers can still work on how to make our students memorise and recall information. In this blog I will explain five, science-based techniques for achieving this goal.

Why do students forget what we teach them?
In the late 1880s, a prominent psychologist, Hermann Ebbinghaus, created “ the forgetting curve .” Today’s researchers still refer to this measure of how much people forget. Without conscientious efforts to reinforce lessons, Ebbinghaus concluded students forget about 56 percent of what they learn within one hour, 66 percent within one day, and 75 percent within six days.

In June 2017, neurobiologists explain in an article in the journal Neuron that without employing strategies to retain knowledge, the brain is “wired to forget”. Information not 
crucial to survival is discarded by the brain as extraneous. Clearly, that’s a huge problem and illustrates the importance of teaching students strategies to retain what they learn. But what are those strategies?
Strategies to help students memorise information 

According to the authors of the Neuron study, one key to helping students retain lessons is to employ strategies to help them form links between new information and existing memories to create a web of connections. Each connection is a strand in the web, and the more strands there are the stronger the web. Another strategy is to make students access lessons repeatedly so they’re not able to simply fade away. 
In practice, there are five techniques you can use to achieve this - 

1. Teachers should assign students frequent practice tests or quizzes.

 When students are given tests or quizzes that they’re not graded on, they’re able to review material in a low-stress environment (stress can undermine memory retention.) it has been proven that when student work under stress free environment they are able to remember what they learnt. This stress free environment gives students the ample time to recall what they have learnt. 
       2. Work on visualization skills.

Teachers should encourage kids to create a picture in their mind of what they’ve just read or heard. For example, say you’ve asked your child to set the table for five people. Have your child imagine what the table should look like, and then draw it. As kids get better at visualizing, they can describe the image instead of drawing it. Most children can learn through visualazation, teachers make sure that their classroom talks to the children by making pictures of concept taught in the classroom 

3. Have your child teach you. 

Being able to explain how to do something involves making sense of information and mentally filing it. Maybe your child is learning a skill, like how to dribble a basketball. Ask your child to teach you this skill. Teachers do something similar by pairing up students in class. This lets them start working with the information right away rather than waiting to be called on.

4. Try games that use visual memory. 

Games improve the mental ability of children and it also makes teaching and learning more meaningful. There are lots of matching games that can help kids work on visual memory, like the classic game Concentration (or Memory). You can also do things like give kids a magazine page and ask them to circle all instances of the word the or the letter a. License plates can also be a lot of fun. Take turns reciting the letters and numbers on a license plate and then saying them backwards, too.

       5. Encourage active reading.

Highlighters and sticky notes are made to make learning more easier: Jotting down notes and underlining or highlighting text can help kids keep the information in mind long enough to answer questions about it. Talking out loud and asking questions about the reading material can also help with working memory. Active reading strategies like these can help with forming long-term memories. Teachers should make sure children have these items with and used them well by helping them to keep or highlight vital information this will help them to memories such information without any difficulties. 

       6. Chunk information into smaller bites.

Breaking chuck information into smaller bites helps students to understand and able to memories them without any difficulties. Students are able to recall such information at any time. Teachers should make it a point to break chuck information into smaller bites for students.

Conclusion
Every teacher and parents becomes disappointed when his child and students aren’t able to recall what he learnt or what he was taught in the school. It’s not the fault of the children since the child wasn’t able to understand or memorize such information. Student become worry when he isn’t able to provide answers to questions ask when he clearly knows that he was taught such topics.
Using the above strategies will help students memories key information.