How to help students retain information: There are two types of teachers. There are teachers that show you how to work out problems, and there are those that make you figure it out yourself.
Ok, maybe there is a third type of teacher too. This teacher will model some of the problems, and then make you figure out some others on your own.
Personally, I think the third teacher has got it going on, but I think it’s VERY important that many, many types of problems are modeled for students. Showing worked examples is a very important concept for reducing cognitive load.
What Helps You Retain Information and What Does it Mean?
So, how can I retain information better? Before you can help your students, you must understand how you retain information better and retain important content in your long-term memory.
The cognitive load theory was developed by John Sweller. Cognitive load is the amount of information that our working memory can hold at a time. If you overwhelm your working memory, you will end up not learning anything at all.
How do I retain information better? There are many steps that you can take as an individual to reduce your cognitive load such as starting simple, slowing down when you feel overwhelmed, and looking at visuals.
As a teacher, there are many steps that you can take to ensure that your students do not get overwhelmed and really help them to be successful and actually learn the information that you are giving them.
There are many ways that you can reduce cognitive load and help your students retain information, but the one that will be discussed in this post is showing worked examples.
How Do Students Retain Information – An Easy and Proven Tip
So, let’s look more into how to help students retain information. Showing worked examples to your students is an easy and proven tip to help them understand and soak in the material.
It’s important to show students what they need to do, how to work out a problem and give them a model that they can understand, showing each piece step-by-step. By reducing it down to single actions, this reduces the intrinsic cognitive load.
After, students can use concrete resources for application purposes.
How to Help Students Retain Information
How can teachers help students retain information? As mentioned, you must show worked examples.
When teaching science, there are MANY times that working out math problems are included in your content. In addition, there are topics such Punnett squares where you will have to show your students examples of how to solve something.
So, let’s just say I was teaching a lesson about speed, velocity, and acceleration. First of all, when showing students how to solve problems you would need to start simple. Start by giving a simple example of speed, then giving more examples of speed. After this, you can move on to velocity and acceleration.
Be sure to show students EXACTLY how to do it. Model step-by-step so they can understand.
One thing that it easy to forget is that some students don’t have the appropriate background knowledge to work out these problems without being given step-by-step instructions. You must SHOW them. Don’t assume that they just know how to do certain things.
Inquiry is an important part of learning as well. After you show your students a few worked examples, you can also allow your students to try a slightly more challenging problems on their own. Guided inquiry during the lesson process is a great approach.
Examples of Modeling
For example, when teaching about mechanical energy: potential and kinetic energy, you can show students, step-by-step, how to solve a kinetic energy problem. Then, you can have them try out the problem on their own, showing them most of the steps. Then, have them to figure out the rest. You can even make the problem slightly more difficult to see if they can apply the information that they learned in previous examples!
Then, you can have students to compare the different types of examples. What’s similar? What’s different?
Application questions are great after these worked examples as well such as, “How did the mass of the rollercoaster train impact the kinetic energy?”
Another Tip: Show your students errors in worked examples. Can they figure out what the mistake is?
I hope you enjoyed these tips on how to help students retain information. It’s essential to bring the WOW Factor to your classroom!
More Resources on Strategies Helping Students Retain Information
Here are some great articles and posts that can help you deep dive further into help your students reduce cognitive load and retain information better.
Simple Practice Doesn’t Always Make Perfect
How to Use Scaffolding when Teaching Science for Guaranteed Success
[…] pat! It’s essential to show students what they need to do when solving a problem. Teachers should model it for them step-by-step. When this is done by reducing the problem down to single actions, this reduces intrinsic cognitive […]