Memory, Learning and Paying Attention

As a teacher, it’s not enough that I present facts and concepts to my students and hope they remember them, it’s imperative that I use strategies to help students transfer information to long term memory for later use. Strategies such as making facts meaningful, presenting them so students use chunking, ensuring they are pronounceable, concrete, etc. help students remember the material. When students can organize the information in some way they are more likely to remember it. I see this all the time in my school when teachers present information through song, repetition, mnemonics and rhyme to help students not only remember the material, but to construct meaning from it.

Perhaps the most important aspect of learning, at least according to Ormrod, is paying attention. This makes sense because how could a student remember, interpret and construct meaning from information if they didn’t pay attention to it? And what grabs their attention is of no surprise to anyone who has taught (or parented) children. According to Ormrod, things like motion, size, incongruity, social cues, and personal significance all play a role in how much a student pays attention. It’s easy to observe this on a daily basis when interacting with children. The level of attention given to an adult presenting verbal instructions versus that which is commanded by a television or computer screen is often significant. As teachers, we have to provide enough distraction and stimulation to garner the attention of our students but not so much that their attention is pulled in too many places at once. This is a daily challenge, as students are often more interested in things other than that which is being presented. I struggle sometimes to maintain the full attention of my students, but am actively working to create lessons that stimulate and allow for the construction of learning.