Three Steps to Perfect Recall: Incorporate Mnemonics into Your Curriculum

Does your students’ poor performance on class tests keep you up at night? Do you find yourself racking your brain, trying to figure out how the same students who seemed to understand what you taught yesterday now seem to remember none of it? Do you stress for months before a large-scale standardized test your students have to take because you fear they will do poorly on it?

If any of these experiences sound familiar to you, you are not alone. These are some of the most common complaints and fears experienced by teachers around the world.

But don’t despair; there is hope! Cognitive scientists have been delving into the mysteries of human memory for over a hundred years, and today we know more about how to teach students so that material really “sticks” like never before.

Today, I want to talk a little bit about one of the easiest ways to radically improve your students’ memory of the material you teach: incorporating mnemonics into your teaching.

Mnemonics: the biggest and fastest bang for your buck

For teachers who are struggling with the issues I mention in the first paragraph of this article and who have yet to start making changes in their instruction, incorporating mnemonic strategies into their teaching just might be the simplest first step they could take to improve their students’ performance.

Why? Well, first of all, because it is easy. You could look at the unit you’re currently teaching, identify the most important pieces of information and key understandings, and create mnemonics for that material in an hour or less.

Second, most students enjoy learning mnemonics, so you’ll also notice an increase in engagement in your classroom when you begin teaching mnemonics to accompany key information and unit ideas. And the increased engagement will also help your students better encode the material you teach because their attention will be more focused.

The process for incorporating mnemonics into your teaching is as easy as 1, 2, 3:

• First, you identify the key material you want students to retain;
• Then, you create the mnemonics you’ll use to ground learning in place; Y
• Finally, you teach the mnemonic to your students.

Let’s briefly look at each step.

1. Identify key material

The first step is very important. You don’t want to try to create mnemonics for everything you teach. Let’s face it, there are crucial facts and key insights you want your students to learn and retain in the long run, but there’s also some “fluff” in every curriculum. You don’t need to create mnemonics for everything, so your first step is prioritization and selection. Identify those facts and understandings that are truly crucial. If you have more than 3-5 on a unit when you’re done, you’re probably not being critical enough in your selection process.

Also, you can’t teach mnemonics for everything because it would take up too much class time. Remember that it takes a little time to teach the mnemonic, and this is in addition to the time you spend teaching the actual material, so there is always a trade-off. You want to make sure that any class time you spend teaching a mnemonic is worthwhile, which means saving your mnemonic for the really important ideas and information.

2. Create appropriate mnemonics

Ok, once you’ve identified the crucial information and ideas that you want to make sure your students remember, now it’s time to create the mnemonics. And the tricky part here is making sure that the mnemonic strategy you choose matches the material. The best way to explain this is to give some examples.

Let’s say you are teaching vocabulary from a foreign language. A good approach here would be to choose several important words that are sight words or words that will unlock many other words built on the same root word. Once you have selected several important words that you want to create mnemonics for, you need to choose your mnemonics strategy. In this case, keywords are probably the best option.

A keyword is an English word your students already know that sounds like the foreign word you want them to remember. For example, suppose you are teaching French and you want your students to remember the noun worldmeaning “world” or “people”. World sounds a bit like the English word “mound”, so you can use “mound” as a keyword to remember world. Now the real trick that makes keywords work is to create a visual image that links the two words together. In this case, you can instruct your students to visualize a “mound of people” stacked on top of each other. Students listening to the word world will see this bunch of people in their minds and remember that world means “people”.

Now, let’s say you’re a science teacher and you’re teaching the steps of the scientific method. There are slight variations in the wording used by different people for the process steps, but for this example I will use this terminology: 1. question, 2. research, 3. hypothesis, 4. experiment, 5. data collection, 6. graph/ analyze data, 7. draw a conclusion and communicate that conclusion to an audience.

Obviously keywords would be a poor choice for this information. Instead, you may want to use a acrostic sentence, which takes the first letter of each term in the list and creates another word that begins with that letter, then joins those words into a sentence. In this case, you could use the acrostic sentence “Queen Rachel Hopes Every Coward Gains Courage” as a mnemonic. Students who memorize this sentence can read it one word at a time to remember the steps and the correct order.

Here is one more example. Let’s say you have something you want your students to remember that has more pieces or steps than the scientific method. For long lists of items, especially if you need to remember them in order, either the memory palace technique or the keyword technique would be your best bet.

Let’s say you’re a high school history teacher teaching the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution), and you want to create a mnemonic so that all your students remember all 10 amendments effortlessly. A good way to approach this task would be to first teach your students the Memory Palace Technique (also called the Memory Palace Technique). loci method) if you still don’t know how to use this.

Using the memory palace technique, each student would vividly visualize a place they know well (most people use their own homes). They would then take the first item in the list and create an image for it while “dropping” it to a specific spot within its displayed location. A good approach is to mentally “walk” the location, placing the images you create along the way. In this way, he is remembering a list of images linked to particular places, but he is also remembering a narrative of you walking around the place in a particular sequence. These approaches (visualization and story) are powerful approaches to memory.

In this case, a student would take the first item on the list (the first amendment, free speech) and link it to a location in their displayed location. Let’s just say he turns “free speech” visually into a set of those wind-up teeth that open and close when you wind them up and hangs that set of teeth on a peg on the back of the door when he first “walks in” . your house.” Then he takes the second item (the second amendment, the right to keep and bear arms) and turns it into a gun which he then places on a table in the hall. The next one is a little more complicated. The third amendment says, “No soldier, in time of peace, shall be lodged in a house without the consent of the owner.” So our student might visualize a soldier standing a little further into the living room. When the student sees the soldier, He points to the door and the soldier leaves the house. See how it works? Since each student will use a different mental location and create unique images, each memory palace will be unique, but everyone will capture the essence of each of the amendments while retaining the correct order. I can virtually guarantee that if you do this, all of your students will score 100% on the test.

So the key here is to choose mnemonic strategies that fit the type of facts or ideas you want your students to remember. Sometimes you can create the mnemonics for them ahead of time (which saves class time), and other times, like in the last example above, you’ll need your students to create the mnemonics, which works great but takes more time.

3. Teach mnemonics

The third step in the process is to actually teach the mnemonic. First, obviously, you should have built into your unit plan the time to teach the mnemonics you’ve created (or have your students create them). You can’t skimp here. If it takes everyone fifteen minutes to memorize the mnemonic, you should allocate fifteen minutes to homework. No ifs, ands, or buts. If it’s really important for them to learn this material and be able to retrieve it later, it’s worth taking the time to get it for them.

The most important thing I have to say about teaching mnemonics is this: you must teach the material well first! Mnemonics are a supplement, not the main way of teaching something. So teach the material well, in the most engaging way you can first (so your students create a strong initial encoding of the material), then teach them the mnemonic. Later, when they use the mnemonic to retrieve the material, they will retrieve good, solid material (they won’t just remember the mnemonic).

I have always found that the best way to teach mnemonics is to have students get into pairs and practice together, and then ask each other questions. Once everyone thinks they have it, have students move to find another partner and quiz. Finally, have volunteers share with the whole class. If they can remember it under pressure from their peers watching them, that usually means they have it.

Of course, like anything else you teach, you’ll want to come back to the mnemonic several times in the first few days after teaching it to push everyone. This will help solidify the mnemonic in their minds.

If you haven’t started using mnemonics in your classroom yet, it’s time to give it a try. I know some teachers see mnemonics as “tricks”, but that’s not entirely correct. There is very solid research behind the use of mnemonics, and they work like magic. This is a strategy that we need to use a lot more than we do!