MEMORY PRESENTATION        
Parent Group on Student Learning
February 12, 2008, 8:30-9:30 am
Nansee Greeley and Robyn Kramer

According to Dr. Mel Levine:

"At no period in our lives is memory subjected to more oppressive taxation and near exhaustion that it is in formal education."

Today we are going to give you an overview of memory.  We will cover several topics:

• The impact of memory on students in school
• The developmental implications for memory
• Some common indicators of possible memory weaknesses
• Components, definitions and functions of memory systems
• Strategies that you can use at home to help build memory

 Overall memory is defined as follows:

• Memory is the mind's system for registering, suspending, consolidating and accessing information.

As you know, the impact of memory on students in school is huge and there are important points that we need to keep in mind regarding this impact.

• No one has a good or bad memory; there are many different forms of memory that have headquarters throughout the brain.  
• Students revealing weakness of memory frequently manifest more than one form of weak memory function.
• Students need to be demystified about the important differences and interactions between memory and understanding.  Just because they understand something when they first read or hear about it does not mean that they will remember the information later.

Developmental Implications for Memory

• Memory function has a strong developmental component.  Younger students rely on relatively primitive rehearsal strategies to recall information, whereas older students make rich semantic relationships among pieces of information to aid consolidation.
• Over time, the demands on memory in school grow greater and more sophisticated.
• Recall from memory must become increasingly rapid and automatic for different kinds of information and skill.
• Students need to acquire an increasingly efficient filing system for memory.
• Effective students become increasingly thoughtful about memory and are able to develop clever strategies to enhance consolidation and access.

Common Indicators of Possible Memory Weaknesses:

• Appearance of knowing more than is indicated by performance on tests
• Problems in math and writing even when relatively little reading is required
• Trouble learning math facts and/or procedures even with the help of drill
• Difficulty expressing ideas on paper despite good oral expression and adequate graphomotor function
• Poor spelling, with errors that are not specifically visual or phonological
• Problems following directions; needing information repeated
• Slow rate of work output and developmentally delayed automatization of facts and/or subskills
• Organizational problems
• Difficulty studying for tests

Introduction of Placemat

General overview of layout and organization

Explanation of three components of memory:  

• Short term memory
• Active working memory
• Long term memory

Short-Term Memory:
Briefly registering new information that is subsequently used, stored, or forgotten.

According to Dr. Levine:
Short-Term Memory is the gatekeeper, one of learning's principal entry points.   When new information arrives in Short-Term Memory, we have some quick decisions to make:  we can forget it right away, use it right away and then forget it, use it and then store it for future use or delay its use and send it straight to Long-Term Memory.  Such options must be chosen with incredible speed.  The preliminary interpretation and dispatching of new information in Short-term memory usually takes place within two seconds.

Active-Working Memory:
Mentally suspending information while using or manipulating it.

According to Dr. Levine:
An example of AWM is the memory you use when you go to your closet to look for your shoes.  En route, it is vitally important that you bear in mind the reason that your had originally decided on your closet as a destination.  If, on the other hand, you arrive at the closet door and have no idea why you are there, you have experienced some humbling limitations of your Active-Working Memory.

You can see that if a particular part of a task is fully automatic for you, you free up more space in AWM.  On the other hand, if some component of what you are doing is a struggle for you, that demand takes up more than its share of mind space, and is likely to displace or contaminate priorities.  During writing, for example, if keyboarding or letter formation skills are not automatic, this task component may take up too much space in AWM at the expense of spelling accuracy.  You can think of students with this problem.  They spell accurately while spelling words aloud, but misspell some of the same words on a written examination.  

Long-Term Memory:
This gets divided into two stages: consolidation and access.
LTM is defined as permanently storing (consolidating) and retrieving (accessing) information, including knowledge, skills, and experiences

It represents a seemingly limitless repository for cumulative knowledge, skills and life experiences.  Its massive storage vaults can be drawn upon throughout life; they appear to offer endless capacity.

According to Dr. Levine:
When it is working well, LTM increases the likelihood of academic mastery, and when it malfunctions, it becomes a reason for failure.  The recovery of stored knowledge and skill is a never-ending challenge for students.

LTM logically gets divided into two stages:  Consolidation and Access.
Consolidation is the act of systematically filing information in the LTM storage system.  Access is the process through which we subsequently locate that information.

Levine also says, consolidation does not occur easily when students have Social Studies for 40 minutes, followed by Algebra for 40 minutes, followed by Language Arts for 40 minutes, topped off by Physical Education.  Clearly each class period interferes with the consolidation of the subject matter that preceded it.  He says, class periods should be longer, and there should be time to consolidate.  

That is part of what we are trying to achieve with the block scheduling here at MPA.

Levine also explains that access enables students to respond to questions in class or on a test, recall spelling words while writing, and remember arithmetic facts as needed.  Over time, students must access information and procedures with increasing speed and precision.  In addition, the nature of their school work requires what they have learned to be accessible instantly and with little or not expenditure of mental effort.   This frees up their minds for sophisticated thinking or problem solving to take place at the same time the retrieval is occurring.

We could go into more specifics and break down these components even further, but what we really want to do is get to some strategies that you can do at home to help build memory.

We took these out of our strategies binder and consolidated them into a resource for you.

Go over strategies list.

1. Break extended activities into smaller tasks.
2. Limit the use of multistep directions by giving only one or two steps at a time.  Ask students to repeat the directions before beginning the task.
3. Group similar concepts together within a lesson.   Help students see patterns through the organization of the presentation.  
4. Ask students to practice organizing words and concepts based on similarities and differences. Use discussion, listing, and concept maps.  (e.g., Ask students to compare dogs to lions or Thanksgiving to Valentine's Day.)  
5. Create organizational activities for spelling words (organize by shared prefixes and suffixes), math facts (organized by math families), and many other areas at varying levels of difficulty.
6. Recode information by paraphrasing and summarizing.
7. Point out explicit connections between a strategy and its value to learning and emembering.  (e.g., "Making a list of the geometric shapes covered before doing the worksheet will help you to remember the shapes and do a good job on the worksheet.")
8. Provide instruction in effective underlining, highlighting, and outlining of important information.  Teach students to incorporate a color-coding system when underlining or highlighting.  
9. Give students practice in identifying cues to salient information. (e.g. recognizing significant words in a textbook, identifying key phrases in a lecture).
10. Discuss key words from tests that provide direction for tasks (e.g., circle, underline, list, upper, lower, compare, and contrast).
11. Encourage students to listen to and/or read all directions before drawing conclusions or beginning an assignment.
12. Incorporate listening games to illustrate the importance of careful listening (e.g., the message game "Operator," fun or tricky questions to respond to: Do they have a Fourth of July in France?  Is it legal for a man to marry his widow's sister?).
13. Teach students to use a self-monitoring technique for active listening (e.g., FACT: Focus attention - Ask yourself questions - Connect ideas - Try to picture important ideas).
14. Teach students that vocalizing is an important step in the mastery of new strategies.
15. Incorporate visual imagery "scratch pads" into the vocalizations.  Students picture in their minds the words and ideas as they vocalize.
16. Incorporate a routine self-monitoring strategy into students' day-to-day learning. Checklists can be provided to serve as visual cues until students internalize the process. This may be as simple as a log, in which students monitor their attention level, careful listening level, and use of active rehearsal throughout the day.
17. Require students to self-test information they think will be needed for later use,  Encourage students to answer questions found at the end of the chapter as they read each section in the text that contains the necessary information (i.e., interspersed questions) or have them create a test for the chapter as a study guide.  Sparknotes.com was recommended.
18. Use physical movement, games, role play, and hands-on learning to add a sensory element to the cognitive activity.  Adding a sensory element can enhance both storage and retrieval.  
19. Relate learning materials to information already stored in long-term memory.  (e.g.,     When learning about animals, encourage students to talk about their pets, animals found at the zoo, or animals seen on TV.)
20. Ask students to make up a story using key concepts, they are learning (e.g., a plant undergoing photosynthesis, an adventure through a geometrically shaped house, or a role play of a special time in history).  Such stories may help provide a context for the concepts and create associations in the students' minds for later retrieval.
21. Give students practice applying their knowledge to real life situations.  Discuss with students both how and when skills and information they are learning are needed in real life.  
22. Teach the use of time management skills so students can organize their time efficiently in a testing or learning situation.  Students may need direct instruction in how to estimate the amount of time needed for each section or activity and how to budget their time accordingly.
23. Encourage students to take control of their learning environment at home.  Help students to regulate background noises, organize their desk and working space, and have the necessary materials handy for learning such as note cards for making review cards or blank concept maps for filling in.
24. Reduce the risk of interfering with information that is known and understood by encouraging students to study for a test or quiz just before sleeping and to self-test in the morning.