Learning is based upon engagement, yet in many of our classrooms, engagement is achieved by only a minority of our students. These students are often thinking about how to please the teacher, or how to pass the test.
The majority are neither engaged nor disengaged. These are our compliant learners who do what is required, but who do not really think. Then, we have our actively disengaged learners whose thinking is based upon avoiding the task.
To counter this, teachers have increasingly attempted to motivate students using a wide variety of experiences rather than exploring authentic issues in depth. It is not the role of the teacher to motivate. Rather it is their role to understand how motivation happens, and then create the situation where students motivate themselves. This requires students to be involved in the thinking.
For this to occur, the thinking and learning have to be age-appropriate and supported by intensive and specific skill development to assist in the movement to mastery.
Mastery is not about regurgitating answers in tests. It is about using skills associated with time, task, and self management to explore questions and present their findings in a wide and varied manner. For this to happen, students must believe in themselves, be risk takers, show determination, perseverance, and resilience—most of which are discouraged in the modern classroom.
Sensory memory is the ability to retain impressions of sensory information after the original stimulus has ceased
Information is passed from the sensory memory into short-term memory via the process of attention (the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things), which effectively filters the stimuli to only those which are of interest at any given time.
Short-term memory is also known as working memory. It refers to remembering something from within only a few minutes. It is important to help children improve their short-term memory because being forgetful can be very frustrating. Some children don't forget a thing--even if you wish they did. Other children struggle with remembering, particularly those dealing with ADD/ADHD.
What is actually held in short-term memory, though, is not complete concepts,but rather links or pointers (such as words, for example) which the brain can flesh out from it's other accumulated knowledge.
This information will quickly disappear forever unless we make a conscious effort to retain it, and short-term memory is a necessary step toward the next stage of retention, long-term memory. The transfer of information to long-term memory for more permanent storage can be facilitated or improved by mental repetition of the information or, even more effectively, by giving it a meaning and associating it with other previously acquired knowledge. Motivation is also a consideration, in that information relating to a subject of strong interest to a person, is more likely to be retained in long-term memory.
Mnemonics, Reduce/eliminate distractions, exercise brain to make it work properly
Memory Functions
What is remembered of a particular event depends upon the way in which it is processed. Elaborate processing that emphasizes meaning and associations that are familiar leads to good recall. So, for example, the word albatross would be remembered poorly if only the font in which it was printed was noticed and little thought was given to its meaning. It is much more likely to be remembered, however, if at the time the word is read the reader thinks about how albatrosses are white seabirds living in southern oceans. On the other hand, if what is encountered is difficult to understand, then not only will it be poorly remembered but what is remembered may be distorted by an effort to comprehend the meaning.
The processing of new information draws very heavily upon memory of past experience. Schemas have been developed for often-encountered familiar situations such as going to a supermarket or eating at a restaurant. These schemas guide understanding and memory of the new events but may also lead to memory errors by adding expected events that did not actually occur. Information that is organized on the basis of one's existing knowledge is much easier to learn and remember than is disorganized information. So, for example, a list of the names of animals is much easier to memorize if it is categorized according to type of animals (domestic, farm, wild) and if the categories are laid out in a structured way. Experts in an area memorize new information within their area of expertise much more quickly than do novices. So, soccer fans easily learn new soccer scores and chess masters memorize real board configurations easily.
When material is restudied to strengthen the memory of it, the shorter the interval between the first and second study periods, the less the improvement in recall. This spacing effect is large, so that studying in two spaced sessions can produce twice as much recall as a single session of equal length. The rereading of factual material makes only a small contribution to the further learning of it. Testing oneself by retrieving studied material, however, is a particularly effective technique for improving memory.
What is remembered depends upon the information that is available to cue recall when it is retrieved. In 1983 Tulving summarized much research in the encoding specificity principle. This principle asserts that retrieval is successful to the extent that the cues available at retrieval match those that were processed by the learner at the study phase. The retrieval cues may be aspects of the material that was studied, but they also include environmental cues and the mood and mental state of the learner.
Read more: Memory - Structures And Functions - Information, Processing, Memories, and Learning - StateUniversity.com http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2222/Memory-STRUCTURES-FUNCTIONS.html#ixzz2OLl8hxDI
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