How to Teach Science to Students in Middle School – Long-Term Memory Learning

 Have you ever wanted to know how to teach science to students in middle school and find the most success?

Teaching science to middle school students is one of the greatest things that you can do in your lifetime. First of all, teaching science in general is so much fun to do. Our world is made up of amazing things. Even more, our universe is made up of some awesome things. It’s a honor to share this knowledge with middle school students, as they are just now learning more about themselves and the world that they live in.

As science teachers, there is a lot of knowledge to share such as our atmosphere, how the human body works, the laws of nature, the solar system, how plants adapt to their environment, weather and climate, and so much more. In this post, I discuss how to teach science to students in a way that they can understand it and retain it in their long-term memory.

 

How To Teach Science to Students in Middle School – Secret Sauce

At Bright in the Middle, I use a framework for teaching science that is about bringing the WOW factor to the science class: wonder, overcoming overwhelm, and widen. In the last few weeks, I discussed ways in which you can help your students to wonder. You can easily engage them in different ways and use inquiry-based learning. There are so many ways to get your students engaged in what they are learning and make them intrinsically motivated to learn!

There are many teaching methods for middle school students. In this post, I want to specifically discuss how you can help your students to overcome overwhelm and commit science content to their long-term memory rather than just memorizing material for a test and then forgetting about it.

Read more below to learn how to teach science to students in your middle school classroom!

Overcome – How to Teach Science to Students

Helping your students to reduce cognitive load and decrease the amount of information that their working memory can hold at a time is SUPER important. If students are overwhelmed with too much information, they will not learn anything at all. They tend to shut down a bit.

This is based on the Cognitive Load Theory developed by John Sweller. In the following list, I outline steps (adapted from Richard Mayer’s principles) that you can take in your lesson preparation that reduces student cognitive load and aids in retaining information in long term memory! Be sure to get a copy of this list with examples and a checklist here!

Start Simple

This one is probably easy peasy, and you are likely already doing it. When you are beginning a lesson or even a unit, it is essential to start with the simplest information and work your way up in sequential order, increasing difficulty as the lesson progresses.

When you do this, students have a chance to grasp the simpler concepts before moving on to the more difficult ones.

This can work for both your lesson content as well as the questioning. For example, when you are teaching about acids and bases, it makes more sense for students to know the properties of acids and bases before they can explain what natural indicators are and how they work.

Chunk Information

Chunking information is also an essential tool that can be used when creating your lessons. Chunking is an important strategy where you take information and break it into smaller bits so that it’s easier to commit to memory.

If you’ve heard of this strategy, you have likely heard the phone number example. If you were to take the number 2619741472 and told someone to learn and memorize it, it could be a difficult task. However, if you told the person to learn and memorize the number 261-974-1472, it is now easier to remember because of chunking!

When teaching science, it’s easy to chunk processes in your lessons, chunk using mnemonic devices, chunking laws, and so much more!

Showing Information in Segments

Another way to make sure students commit information to their long-term memory is by showing new information gradually. This is a form of scaffolding.

Scaffolding allows students to learn to do things on their own with instructional support.

As a teacher, you can break down the science content into more understandable pieces for your students, help them to understand it, and then move on. This does go with starting simple!

This is especially important with multi-step problems. Making sure that students understand a segment before moving on the next segment is a plus!

Some other ways to scaffold, besides segmenting, include: using prior knowledge, modeling, graphic organizers, discussions, and providing visuals.  

Showing Worked Examples

Many math teachers have this down 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 load.

There are many math skills that students are required to learn, even in middle school science. They could be learning about potential and kinetic energy, force, speed, velocity, and acceleration, how to solve a Punnett square, and so much more! Be sure that students know EXACTLY how the work should be done through model. After this, students can use concrete resources to explore and apply their knowledge.

Direct Student to Important Information

Even when you are simplifying the information the best that you know how, it still can be a lot for the working memories of your students, especially if they don’t have the prerequisite knowledge that they need.

It’s important to show your students the most important things and highlight them. Of course, you want them to learn ALL the THINGS! That’s what teachers do. However, you need to directly highlight exactly what the most important concepts are that your state requires them to know.

You can underline these concepts, color them, put them in a larger font, or actually highlight them.

Keep Related Pictures and Text Together

This is a great technique that, honestly, I didn’t do very well starting out.

When you have an image that relates to a key word, keep them closely together.

First of all, what is NOT a best practice when it comes to pictures? Don’t put captions at the bottom of the page or your lesson that would require your students to have to go back and forth to make the connections. In addition, if you have a slideshow lesson, be sure not to split pictures and text between slides.

Good practice for this is to make sure that everything is clearly together in one spot. With this, the connection can easily be made if they make sense together and complement each other.

Take Out Unnecessary Information

This is also super important! The less information for working memory, the better. Just as it’s important to highlight the most important information, it’s critical to take the useless information out!

Any text that is redundant or doesn’t relate to what students need to know should be taken out of the presentation. There is always room to extend their knowledge afterward, but for now, only keep what they absolutely need to know to decrease their overwhelm!

Don’t forget, to get the copy of this list with examples and a checklist here! Also, don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. I can help you to make your already awesome lessons even better for your students.

Want to learn more about the lessons with these strategies and be found:

I hope you have enjoyed these strategies on how to teach science to students. Comment below and let me know your favorite!

Also, once you’ve finished teaching a fabulous lesson, don’t forget to WIDEN student knowledge!

Help your students master science content!