Retrieving Memories

In one form or another, teachers are always asking the question, what's worth learning, when they make choices in designing learning experience for their students.

What are the most important concepts skills and attitudes we want them to develop and use after their time with us? That's why we work so hard to create effective learning experiences that we hope will instill long lasting memories of these essential understandings.

But getting those important learnings into our student's heads is only half the battle.

They still need to be able to pull them out, and apply them when needed, be it in later academic settings, or in their lives beyond school.

In fact, much of forgetting is simply not being able to easily call up things we have in memory.

It's often in there, but we just can't retrieve it when we need it.

And we've all experienced many times those failures to recall.

So if learning is to lasting and transferable, meaning that we can apply it under the right conditions after we have learned it, two things need to happen.

First, the new learning must be securely consolidated and integrated into our long-term memory through active learning experiences, as we discussed in previous sessions of this course.

This requires that we think to learn in order to make enduring memories that are solidly linked to our prior knowledge and skills.

Second, the memories need to be readily accessible through recall cues that are triggered by the circumstances we want them to be used for.

In other words, how new learning will be used later, that is under what real world conditions will it have to be retrieved from memory, is crucial to consider as we design ways for new knowledge and skills to be made into memories in the first place.

Cognitive scientists often say, think of retrieval during encoding.

Unfortunately, this important aspect of enduring and transferable learning is often overlooked in learning designs.

So the rest of this session will explore the teaching implications of how we help our students recall the learning we hope they commit to memory in our classes.

Let's start by my asking you a few questions.

How do you spell your last name? Who is the current President of the United States? How many sides to a triangle? How many planets are in our solar system? What did you have to eat for breakfast today? Who is your best friend? What was your most embarrassing experience as a teenager? How do you tie your shoes? What was the plot of the last novel you read? Each of these questions you no doubt answered with varying degrees of quickness and certainty.

Some you were able to retrieve almost instantly, but others took longer to find in your memory.

And still others you had to think about once you retrieved the relevant memories.

Each one too, had a a different pathway to retrieval.

Some were probably direct and automatic, while others because of when and how they were formed, might have required more circuitous path to retrieval.

Questions of this sort can be thought of as retrieval cues.

A cue in the sense that we are talking about here, is information from our surrounding environment that causes us to begin the process of memory retrieval.

It could be sensory information, either in a focused way, like specific smells or sounds, like the smell of a gymnasium reminding you of your sports career, or in combination, the way a person walking and humming in front of you reminds you of your grandmother.

The cues could also be the words in a book or a question a teacher asks.

You could also provide the cue yourself, as when you mentally ask a series of questions trying to remember the plot of the last novel you read.

For our purposes in this course, we're going to distinguish two forms of recall as it relates to memory retrieval, cued recall and free recall.

By cued recall, we will mean any specific visual or verbal cue provided to students intended to elicit a memory.

It could also be a teacher's question asked in class or written questions on a study guide, or the information in the student's notes as he checks his memory to see if he's ready to take a test.

Free recall, on the other hand, is much less specific in the form of the cue.

For example, a teacher for a reading quiz might ask, what were the most important ideas in the homework reading for today? Or we just spent two weeks of class studying photosynthesis, what were the key take away understandings? See how nonspecific these free recall questions are? It's important to know that free recall is a lot harder to do.

It simply takes more work to search your memory, and to respond to those general sorts of cues.

Not only do you have to scan, sort, prioritize and organize more, processing things in working memory as you retrieve information, but you also have to continually be thinking of retrieval cues in your search.

In other words, once the general free recall prompt or cue is asked, the learner must provide the subsequent retrieval cues.

Now here's the really cool thing about free recall as a way to retrieve memories, it is very effective as a way to make memories that last longer and are easier to retrieve.

The cognitive effort required not only modifies in more specific and organized ways prior memory being recalled, but it also allows the learner to develop retrieval cues for that memory rather than relying on some external cue like a teacher's verbal question, a written quiz, or a study guide question.

As long as there's something in memory to recall, the desirable difficulty of free recall can be a powerful learning tool.

It's important to note that after any free recall practice, students need feedback of some sort to about whether their recall was accurate and complete.

This is crucial, otherwise inaccurate and/or incomplete memories might be the result, exactly what we don't want to have happen.

We'll say a lot more about retrieval practice in weeks three and four when we discuss study skills and instructional strategies.

Here are a few more things to keep in mind about retrieval as we design learning experiences for our students.

First, match memory and coding with memory retrieval.

This goes back to the principle mentioned earlier, think of retrieval during encoding.

As you design lessons for students to learn new things, think about under what circumstances they will be asked to retrieve that information.

For example, if you want your students to write effectively, what will be the eventual circumstances they will need to write effectively? Who will be the audience? What will be the purpose? If those questions and context are present, at least in part at encoding, then when the student encounters them elsewhere when needed, the more likely they will be to retrieve the relevant memories.

Next, organization helps retrieval.

If a learner is given the opportunity to take information already put in memory, and reorganize it some way by thinking about connections and relationships, the more consolidated the memory subsequently becomes, and the easier it will be to retrieve later.

Likewise, if the learner is made aware of organizational relationships during memory formation, the easier it will likely be to retrieve the memories with more than one retrieval cue.

Next, effective retrieval should take time.

Unless the knowledge to be retrieved is of a rote learning sort or basic facts on call, then encouraging students to work hard at trying to recall things, as well as giving them time to do so, is important.

This includes questions students are asked in class by providing wait time for them to retrieve and process their answer to an impromptu teaching query.

Finally, knowing purpose and meaning make retrieval easier.

When the learner understands the relevance and purpose of what we are asking them to learn, it will be better linked to their prior knowledge during memory formation, and will be more likely to be readily retrieved thereafter.

Few factors are more important for learning, both motivationally and cognitively, then personal meaning and purpose.