However, when students lack the background knowledge that they can relate to the new information provided, it may be difficult for them to understand the material well.
Additionally, students who are forced to memorize information without truly understanding the material can hinder their future learning. why When students are asked to remember information they don’t understand, “it’s going to be something you forget very quickly,” Willingham continued. “Understanding really is the cornerstone of remembering.”
Another reason students can’t remember what they’ve learned is that people just forget things.
Cara Goodwin, a child psychologist, said there is a neurological reason why students may not remember something they were present for. The prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, the areas of the brain responsible for memory integration and retrieval, are not fully developed until age 25, she said. “Our brains develop very gradually throughout childhood, so … these memory skills should get better and better as children get older,” she said.
According to Willingham, “forgetting is a natural part of memory.”
Learning aids for information retention
Despite some forgetting, Conlon has her toolkit of strategies to help her students retain as much information as possible, such as speaking in Spanish most of the time in class to ensure the children have plenty of contact with Spanish. She also does activities and lessons emotionally engaging for her students. “I think the more invested they are, the more they’ll be able to learn that language and really pay attention to the input they’re getting,” Conlon said.
For Conlon’s first- through fifth-grade students, emotionally engaged learning takes place through play, singing, dancing and reading stories. In Connecticut, where she teaches, learning through play is a must for preschool and kindergarten, and schools are required to allow teachers to use a play-based learning approach through fifth grade.
According to Willingham, one effective learning strategy is low stakes and ungraded quizzes with immediate feedback. “Going into your memory and trying to find something, even if you fail, is a really good way to cement something in memory that was there, but kind of fragile,” he said.
Context clues can also be very useful when helping students retrieve information they think they have forgotten. That goes for adults, too, Goodwin said. For example, if someone asks you what the capital of Virginia is, you might not remember, but if they give you a context clue like “it starts with the letter ‘R,'” you might be able to guess that it’s Richmond, she continued.
Annual coordination of the curriculum and communication between teachers and teachers
Teachers can help students retain knowledge, but these processes must be incorporated into the curriculum at appropriate times, Willingham said. If there’s a skill or knowledge that needs to be retained by the time a student graduates from high school, but that student first acquired that information in middle school, “then that content needs to be revisited periodically,” in meaningful ways, Willingham said.
Often, teachers and other adults can forget what it’s like to be a student learning information for the first time. The “curse of knowledge,” as Willingham describes it, makes it difficult to “put yourself back into the mindset of someone who doesn’t already know (certain information), and so it seems like it should be a lot simpler than it is.”
Conlon credited the district-wide push for stronger vertical articulation for the helpful cross-grade conversations she had with other teachers in her department. Through these meetings, Conlon and her fellow elementary teachers are able to meet with middle school teachers to discuss how students are preparing for sixth grade
Conlon encouraged teachers to take an observation day to see what other teachers at different levels are doing in their classrooms. At the elementary level, you might see students playing, “but that play leads to language learning and acquisition, social emotional skills, and all those things that hopefully set them up for success in sixth grade,” Conlon said.
