By Mr Kwok
It has been more than two years since I posted Achieving a Powerful Memory (Part 1): A Method Excellent Teachers (and Students) use. Till now, Part 2 has yet to be published and perhaps never will be. One of the reasons lies in the onslaught of unprecedented changes in the outside world forcing us to scrape what little time we have to make the necessary responses – in short, Covid-19 has happened.
Just as importantly, I have reflected and researched a bit over the past two years about the issue of content retention i.e. memory. We have seen often enough how seemingly cognitively capable students fail miserably all because they could not regurgitate the correct content at the right time. On our end, we continually grapple with this issue in our students and how to best manage it.
(Incidentally, this is one common cause out of a list of others that makes poor performers out of students. This checklist was posted in A Checklist of Reasons Why Students Perform Poorly – Are you looking at the right ones?)
Our Verdict
Perhaps, there is no need to further discuss other methods of achieving a powerful memory. Simply working on those suggestions given in that landmark post will produce the desired results if indeed a weak memory is the cause of poor performance. As the adage goes, it is the quality and not the quantity that counts.
As mentioned in the original post (have you read it yet?), stories are fantastic aids in creating long term memory. But if you are like a typical student in a typical MOE school, you soon realise that many types of content cannot be built into stories. Think mathematics and to a lesser extent, science. Even for humanities, it becomes cumbersome and time consuming to link everything into stories.
At the other end of the spectrum, drilling and skills practice at first glance appear too boring to be useful. However, we believe that they too have their place, especially in the languages and math. You need that boring practice to recognise the patterns inherent in the subjects and drill these patterns till they become second nature. Of course, these activities can be made interesting by gamification or associating them to topics that are trending in the students’ social media.
In our opinion, the most functional way to remember school stuff is to build as many connections through as much content as possible using mind mapping which was suggested in the aforementioned post. Mind maps work best when created by the user himself. They provide a visual picture of how something is linked to everything else. This can be empowering to the user, especially if he is predominantly a visual learner. Imagine the entire topic is summarised into a single page of words logically joined up by lines. If nothing else, it generates a sense of mastery of the topic.
An example from PSLE Science on Forces
Here is a mind map that we used in our lesson for PSLE Science on Forces, one of the more highly weighted topics. Yes, this was created by our tutor rather than by the students themselves. Nevertheless, it did provide them a perspective of how the various contents can be connected so that they can return home to create a personalised version for themselves.
The Next Step: Visual Mapping?
Looking at the figure above, one obvious feature is its rather bland appearance. Adding colours in a rational fashion e.g. blue for important factors, green for details, would have made for a more impactful mind map. Hand drawn images to represent some important concepts e.g. a catapult for elastic force, would have packed a punch! As the user drew the image, he actually neurally linked the abstract concept of elastic force to a tangible product i.e. catapult, inevitably strengthening his memory of both. Incorporating the above upgrades leads to a visual map.
Naturally, visual mapping requires a higher commitment of time and effort so we feel that it should be reserved for the more important content, whether in terms of exam weightage or it being fundamental to the subject.
