4 Ways to Ensure Your Lessons Stick with Students
by Charan Ranganath
Link to full article. Excerpts below.
Over a century of research on human memory shows that we forget much of what we experience within a day. The small proportion of things we do retain weigh heavily on our future actions. As Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Dr. Daniel Kahneman put it, “We make our decisions in terms of our memories.”
What makes a lesson memorable?
While writing my book, Why We Remember, I faced the challenge of encapsulating over a century of research on the science of memory in a way that readers could understand and apply to their daily lives. Drawing upon that science, I came up with what I call the four Cs of memorable messaging. You, too, can use the concepts from memory science to craft engaging lessons—whether it’s a class activity, an assignment, or a discussion—that will be likely to stick with students.
1. Chunk it up
The human brain can only keep a limited amount of information in mind at any given time.
… To get around working memory capacity limits, we can use, “chunking,” in which we explicitly tie together the points that we want to convey under the umbrella of a central idea. With this approach, your students can stitch the pieces together in a meaningful way and build a rich memory for that material.
For instance, when people would ask me to explain how we can keep our memory functioning well as we get older, I used to give them a long list of things to do. Now, I just give them a simple answer: “Your brain is a body part, so what is good for your body is good for your brain and your memory.” I follow up this simple concept with the specifics, including what to do (aerobic exercise, Mediterranean diet, getting enough sleep, etc.) and what to avoid (chronic stress, infections, air pollution, etc.). By starting with one basic principle, and breaking it down into two subcategories, I organize a disconnected laundry list of facts into a cohesive network of knowledge.
2. Make it concrete
When teaching a complex topic, you can make it memorable by using a concrete example. Research shows that people find it harder to memorize an abstract concept, like “justice,” than something that we can easily visualize or imagine, like “gavel.”
Although I know this as a scientist, it took me a while to incorporate that advice in my own teaching. For many years, I taught classes in which I focused all my time on the concepts that I wanted students to learn. When writing Why We Remember, however, I had to adopt a different approach to make the same material more accessible. So, I started off each chapter with an emotionally engaging story, embellished with sensory details to immerse the reader.
3. Provide callbacks
Recalling something that we previously learned can make it stronger and easier to access when we will need it. This is why tests can be the most powerful educational tool in an instructor’s arsenal. … In fact, you can test students before you have even taught them the answer—pre-testing students on what they are about to learn can be just as effective as testing them on what they have already learned.
… We scanned people’s brains while they were listening to stories, and at one point in each story there was a sentence that referred back to an event that was described a few minutes earlier. During the callback, we saw greater activation of the brain circuitry involved in forming new memories, and the callback helped our subjects retain more information from the story.
4. Spark their curiosity
… Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found that when people are confronted with a question and are curious to learn the answer, there is a spike in activity in areas of the brain that process dopamine. These brain areas seem to play a role in energizing us to chase rewards (like traveling a long distance to your favorite pizzeria). Moreover, dopamine enhances the brain’s ability to form new memories, which might explain why curiosity turbocharges learning.
Research suggests the key to stimulating that dopamine bump is to highlight a knowledge gap. We all have gaps in our knowledge about the world, but we are often unaware of those gaps. By highlighting the gap between what your students know and what you want them to know, you can elicit a little error signal in their brains, leading to a state that is conducive to new learning.
This article was originally published on hbr.org and has been adapted with the author’s permission.
Dr. Charan Ranganath is a psychology professor at the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience and is the director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of the book Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold On to What Matters (Penguin Random House).