Helping students remember their science content can be quite a challenge. In the past, I have described many ways that you can help students remember the information that they learned in science class. There are a variety of techniques that you can implement into your lessons that will help the information stick into your students’ brains, and they can ace the test! You want to maximize student learning in your classroom!
Beyond that, students are able to commit this information to long-term memory, remember it for a lifetime, and build upon it in sequential grade levels.
In this post, I discuss one of these tools that will be vital for helping students remember what they have learned, but first, why do students forget what they’ve learned in the first place?
Why Students Forget What They Have Learned?
We’ve all been there. You taught your students everything that you know. Then, your students complete their test. Then, next thing you know, you’ve graded them, and some students just didn’t do so hot. Even worse, later in the year, you realize your student have forgotten everything that you taught them at the beginning of the year!
This can be so frustrating as a teacher. Trust me, I’ve been there.
So, why does this happen? Much of it has to do with cognitive load and how the information is presented in the first place. There are three types of cognitive load (Sweller, Merriënboer, and Paas, 1998).
- Intrinsic Cognitive Load: the difficulty of the material; teachers can’t control, but must be aware
- Extrinsic Cognitive Load: how information is presented; teachers control this and should teach effectively and simple
- Germane Cognitive Load: compacity to create new schema
Teacher Focus to Help Students
Teachers’ focus should be on extrinsic cognitive load and working to help decrease student cognitive load in the classroom. This will assist in helping students remember the science content?
To do this, teachers need to keep things simple, and build upon them. When you are teaching, information is going into your students’ working memory. Students are taking in information from all of their senses. Their brains filters out irrelevant information.
Think about when you are teaching, and a student asks a question. Did you hear that student’s question, or did you hear that bird chirping outside? Our brains can only process a few pieces at a time. Relevant information will go into working memory, will be processed, or forgotten. We want our students to store important information into long-term memory.
Not all of the information that your students learn will go into long-term memory. Age and development affect the cognitive load, which is something that we cannot help, but we can change the way that it functions.
One factor that impacts how information goes into long-term memory is how it goes into working memory. If working memory is overwhelmed, nothing may be taken in at all, and that’s what we, as teachers, need to work on.
In this post, I will talk about one strategy that you can use in your lessons to help decrease your students cognitive load and help them commit more science content to their long-term memory. As mentioned, there are several strategies that you can use.
So drum roll please…
Helping Students Remember Content (Strategy found here!)
One strategy that you can use to help reduce cognitive load is to keep related pictures and text together in your lessons. It seems pretty self-explanatory, but I was shocked to look back at my lessons from previous years to see that I did not do this myself.
It’s important to keep related text and pictures together if they make sense together and complement each other.
The text and the graphic should not be separated, This can be easier said than done based on how much room that you have or how many vocabulary words you are trying to teach to your students. Just be sure to keep things simple not to overwhelm.
Now that you know what to do, let’s talk about what not to do.
- Don’t not to put captions at the bottom of your lesson delivery that requires learners to have to scan back and forth from the captions to the pictures
- Do not split pictures and text on different slides or pages (guilty). You want to keep the related text and pictures together as much as possible.
- When choosing the graphics to accompany your text, be sure to use related graphics and not decorative graphics. Decorative graphics are unnecessary information that should be taken out. Only essential information should be given to students working memory so they are not overwhelmed!
How To Remember Vocabulary Effectively
Whether you are wanting to know how to remember facts or how to remember vocabulary, this is a great strategy to use.
You can even go beyond the lesson to use this strategy. One of my favorite ways to help students retain information is through a word wall. This is a great tool for helping students remember science vocabulary and content!
Word walls are a great visual tool that includes a collection of vocabulary words (ideally, they would be directly aligned to your state standards) that are displayed somewhere in your classroom for your students to view.
On the word wall, if you include the word beside a related graphic and include a short definition, your students will better retain the information collectively.
You can even include word wall cards by an anchor chart. Having some sort of graphic organizer, acronym, diagram accompanied with a word wall beside it is a very useful tool!
Other Ways to Aid in Helping Students Remember Science
Not only can you adjust the text and images in your lessons to make sure they are related, but there are SIX other strategies to implement so that students are reaching maximum learning. You can learn more about these here:
- Start Simple
- Chunk Information
- Show Information in Segments
- Show Worked Examples
- Direct Students to Important Information
- Take Out Unnecessary Information
More Resources on Helping Students Remember
Need some more ideas? Check out these helpful resources.
7 Steps to Help Your Students Retain Information Like a Rockstar
Working Memory Underpins Cognitive Development, Learning, and Education
References
Sweller, J., van Merriënboer, J. J. G., & Paas, F. G. W. C. (1998). Cognitive architecture and instructional design. Educational Psychology Review, 10(3), 251-296.
[…] When you have an image that relates to a key word, keep them closely together. […]