Since much of what we teach to our learners consists of facts that must be remembered, memory strategies such as paired-associate learning, serial learning or free-recall learning might be helpful. Once these factual materials have been assimilated, our learners will have more time and energy for meaningful learning.

Serial learning refers to learning facts in a particular order, for example, learning events on a timeline in a History class or learning the order of operations in a long multiplication or division. Free-recall learning, on the other hand, is learning a list of items that need not be remembered in any specific order, for example, learning the names of rivers in Mauritius.

Another popular memory strategy that involves a reorganisation of information is taking initial letters of a list to be memorised and making a more easily remembered word or phrase. This is known as initial?letter strategies. Many such strategies exist for remembering the order of the planets from the sun. The planets in order are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Learners are taught a sentence in which the first letters of the words are the first letters of the planets in order, Initial?letter such as, ?My very educated monkey just served us nine pizzas.? Dansereau and colleagues (1979) used the acronym ?murder? to help learners remember the strategy. The components of the ?murder? strategy are:

● Mood ? get into the mood of learning.

● Understand the goals and conditions of the task. To do this, learners must identify what they do not understand.

● Recall information that is relevant to the task. Use strategies such as paraphrasing, imaginary and analyzing key concepts to develop the ability to recall the material.

● Detect omissions, errors and ways of organizing the information. Use resources to clear up any misunderstandings and omissions identified in the U step.

● Elaborate the information into a proper response. Expand on information and relate it to material in memory by asking oneself questions such as:

● What questions would I ask the author if I could? How can the material be applied?

● Review the material and focus on information that has not been learned well.

Developing these memory strategies will, indeed, enable our learners to grasp factual information more effectively and (as mentioned earlier) provide them with more time and energy for meaningful learning.

What is meaningful learning?

It is making sense out of information, sorting it in our minds until it fits in a neat and orderly way, and using old learning to assimilate new learning. We have limited ability to recall rote information - how many telephone numbers can you remember for a month? However, we can retain meaningful information easily.

Meaningful learning is not arbitrary as it relates to information or concepts learners already have. For example, if we teach our learners that plants need sunlight to produce photosynthesis, this information relates to our existing information about plants, sunlight and photosynthesis. Further, the association between them is not arbitrary. Plants really need sunlight to grow and produce its food and we can state the same function in many ways or in any language, the meaning of the statement ?Plants need sunlight to produce photosynthesis? cannot be arbitrarily changed.

Meaningful information is, therefore, stored in our long?term memory. It is that part of our memory system where we keep information for long periods of time. It is thought to be a very large?capacity, very long?term memory store. Many psychologists believe that human beings never forget the information stored in their long?term memory. For example, the information about plants, sunlight and photosynthesis cannot be forgotten rather, we may just lose the ability to find the information within our memory.

On the other hand, the short-term memory is a storage system that can hold a limited amount of information for a few seconds. It is the part of memory in which information that is currently being thought about is stored. The thoughts we are conscious of at any given moment are held in our short-term memory. When we stop thinking about something, it disappears from our short-term memory. For example, learners at CPE level remember their lessons on the natural features of Mauritius as long as they are thinking about them. They are able to tell about rivers, mountain peaks, volcanic craters and so on as long as they are learning about them. However, soon after the CPE examination, the capacity to recall this information fades out, as they are no longer thinking about them.

Another term for the short-term memory is working memory. It emphasises that the most important aspect of the short-term memory is not its duration but the fact that it is active. It is mainly for this reason that we need to teach our learners such memory strategies so that the factual information that they have to learn in school can be actively processed by their short-term or working memory.

by Shardha SANDAPEN