When it comes to how kids memorize and remember content, teachers do little and kids get even less. We simply accept that large amounts of the information teachers transmitted to students would be lost and yet, we still don’t do much about it. We allow students to go through their academic careers flailing without helping them improve their content acquisition skills.

Unless they have naturally good memory or they are taught such skills elsewhere, they carry their underachievement throughout their time in school.This doesn’t have to be the case. And as teachers, we can do much better.

No Matter What the Future Brings

If you know something on one day but you forget it a month later, have you learned it? We can have “if a tree falls in the woods…” debates all we want, but answering practically from the standpoint of a teacher’s unit test or a state’s end or course exam, the answer is clearly “No.”

Whether kids consciously try or not, there’s simply no way around memorization. Think about how much information you had to memorize during just your high school years. Did anyone ever tell you how to go about it? Probably not.

We know kids have to memorize things in order to be successful academically, but we rarely teach them anything about how human beings keep things in memory.

Perhaps the simplest and most valuable thing to know about memory is this: we remember what we pay attention to; attention and memory go hand in hand. The word “attention” here is important, especially for students who might rather doodle in their notebooks in the back of the classroom.

We can sit in class staring at a textbook all period, and even reading the words, but we may not remember much, even right after class, if we don’t pay attention to our reading as we do it.

One of the most interesting things about memories is that we recreate them every time we remember them. Typically, we’re cued to do this by some stimulus. For example, hearing a bit of a popular song may remind an excited teenager about an upcoming dance. The cue and the memory are associated with each other in your mind. Better and more frequently-presented cues equals stronger and more easily retrieved. So one of the best things we can do for kids is help them develop useful cues.

A teenager who loves music and the social interaction of dances, doesn’t need our help in finding good cues. But how can we use cueing to help kids remember events in American history or math formulas or scientific facts? How do we remember things we probably wouldn’t be interested in otherwise?

One common answer is to “make it relevant” to students. That’s great. But is it always possible? And is it possible for every kid when what relevance is such a personal thing?

Books abound with memorization techniques, simple mental devices people have used for centuries. One of the most famous of these, and probably still the cheapest, is The Memory Book by Harry Lorrayne and former New York Knicks basketball star Jerry Lucas. These technique will work but for some ironic reason they haven’t ever become a common part of education.

Specific memorization techniques aside, there are two general categories of academic activities that can strengthen our memories whether we know any memorization techniques or not: recall activities and elaboration activities, both of which can help kids develop strong cues to the things we want them to remember.

Never Out of Date

An easy type of recall activity is questioning. You can immediately understand how questioning might help. After all, much of what we do in school is answer questions. Asking questions, even very simple ones, while you take in new information, can help you remember it more thoroughly.

In one study, researchers found that having students simply ask themselves “Why?” after each sentence they read improved their memory of the text. This probably isn’t the most enjoyable way to read but you can see why it might work: forcing the question focuses your attention on the material, even if you don’t know the answer.

When we recall a memory, we strengthen it. Of course, we can make mistakes with recall activities, too. How many kids have “learned” that 6 × 7 = 44? The old adage, “Practice makes perfect.” is itself imperfect. The truth of learning and memory is that “practice makes permanent.” Practice only makes perfect if we practice perfectly. This is why flash cards and timed tests and other traditional classroom recall activities that emphasize mind-numbing speed over accuracy might not be as effective as activities that emphasize accuracy and focused attention—if we taught those type of activities to kids.

Attention helps us form a memory, recall helps us strengthen a memory, but how do we hold onto memories? How do we store things in so-called “long term memory”? What’s the best way to store information so we can remember it weeks, months, or even years later?

Memory expert Dr. Harold Pashler puts it this way: “Many studies have concluded that the key factor is elaboration: active processing that uncovers connections between a to-be-stored item and other information in long-term stor[age]. By contrast, mere intention or desire to remember seems relatively unimportant.”

So to put something into long term memory, we have to do something more with it. Writing is probably the easiest and most common thing we’d do in school. If you parse Dr. Pashler’s response, you can immediately tell why. Writing involves “active processing” and the “uncover[ing]” of connections between what we want to remember and what we already know. Elaboration would seem to give us all the benefits of attention plus the added benefits of recall.

To put all this in perspective, here’s an activity I use frequently when conveying information in a lecture format. First, kids know that I have already created the basic notes for the lecture so all their attention can be focused on what I’m talking about at the moment; having kids takes notes while we teach is often a disaster. After talking for maybe ten minutes at most, I ask kids to make lists of what they feel were the most important bits of information. We quickly share these bits around the classroom. Sometimes, I write them on the board. And often we reorganize them in some logical way.

Finally, I ask kids to write a quick paragraph or two elaborating on what we’ve just discussed. Now, when they leave class, they have lecture notes, what we all agreed was most important, and their own elaboration. This doesn’t work every time for every kid, but you can see that it follows the attention, recall, elaboration pattern that should give most kids the best chance of learning and remembering it.

On This You Can Rely

One thing is almost always true about school: not enough information about learning makes it through the classroom door. This is no one’s fault but it is everyone’s responsibility. Why, when we want our children to learn so much, do we tell them so little about how to learn it?

Because nobody told us.

Most of education is governed by tradition and most educators are creatures of habit. The way we do something now is the way we did something then. We don’t question many things. Often we don’t have the time or the energy; mostly we don’t have the interest. But when it comes to understanding a little bit about memory, and helping kids hold onto all that information they need, learning a bit about memory is an important step in solving the content acquisition problem.

Since repetition in a slightly different format enhances memory, here’s a bullet point summary of things we can do to help more kids learn more things that I hope will enhance your memory of the important ideas in this article:

  • Provide a coherent curriculum that builds content knowledge. Of all learning strategies we know, nothing works better than actually knowing things. Kids need an information-packed curriculum that builds logically upon itself from year to year. Increasing non-fiction reading is one of the easiest ways to bring more knowledge into kids’ lives.
  • Intervene earlier when kids are having problems that might cause them to miss crucial curriculum. We are practically panicked when kids can’t read, just as we should be. But we’re positively complacent when they fall behind in other subjects. While reading is, arguably, more important, the result of falling behind in just about any area is that kids never catch up. We must intervene early and often to plug gaps in students’ knowledge—regardless of the subject.
  • Give kids different ways to work with the same information. Tell students about something, let them read about it, let them watch something, let them discuss, pose questions that shift their perspective, provide a variety of opportunities for kids to encounter the information we want them to learn. Again, a well-coordinated curriculum is an important piece of this part of the puzzle, too, as topics can be revisited with increasing complexity over time.
  • Give kids opportunities to reason with the information they acquire. Ironically, if we want kids to take in a lot of information, we have to give them many opportunities to spit it out. Even if the information being studied is the same for every student, each will likely have different reactions, thoughts, questions, and connections they can make to other information. Each learner has to integrate new information with their own version of existing information. Reasoning with new information—trying to solve intellectual problems—is a great way to do it.
  • Teach common memorization techniques. Explicit techniques exist for memorizing information. You can find them in books or in articles on the Internet. Sometimes they can very useful to students. At the very least, they are interesting to study for a lesson or two all by themselves because they give us some insight into the ways in which our memory works.
  • Attend to attention while learning. As cognitive psychologist Dan Willingham so thoughtfully puts it, “Memory is the residue of thought.” We remember the things we think about and we think about the things we pay attention to. Giving thought to the meaning of information is more useful, in general, than merely attending to the information itself. (Reviewing information without attending to meaning is one of the biggest mistakes kids make when they study.) As students learn new material, encourage them to connect it to previous material. Invite them to question what they’re learning about and why it matters. “Why” may be the single best question of all.
  • Use recall activities to strengthen memory. Memories fade. And it’s not very likely that kids are going to run home and watch a sitcom about osmosis or the Spanish-American War. So to keep new memories alive, they’re going to need recall activities, specifically those that give them useful cues to the information they are trying to retrieve. Just remember, practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes permanent. So thoughtful, accurate practice is usually better than faster practice with more mistakes. Slow and steady makes good grades on tests and quizzes.
  • Use elaboration activities to improve long term memory. To move ideas into long term memory, we want kids to extend what they’ve learned using their own abilities. Writing is one of the easiest ways to do this. Push kids to do just a little more, to find out one more thing, to puzzle out one more part of the mystery. Above all, encourage them to draw connections, support conclusions, and develop what we might think of as their own independent understanding of the material.

One of the hardest things about learning is that human beings have a tendency to over-estimate their ability to remember things. We think we know things better than we do. This encourages us at time to not work as hard as we might in school and to not study as much as we should when we get home. In a sense, then, to really know something, we often have to feel like we’ve over-learned it.

To solve the content acquisition problem in America, we’re going to have to do some over-learning, too. There’s no reason why every teacher can’t understand and apply a small amount of information about how memory works. There’s no reason why we can’t share this information with students in ways that help them optimize their learning. There’s no reason why we can’t recognize that much of what we ask kids to do at school is attend to, understand, manipulate, and remember information—and that there are some ways of doing these things that are much more effective than others.