Do you ever feel like the information you pour into your students each week is going into a sieve? As you rev up for annual assessment tests in April, are you finding yourself shocked by how little students remember from what you taught in the fall?

It turns out that if you want things to stick in students' long-term memory, how you teach the material is just as important as what you're teaching in the first place.

In the book Brain Matters: Translating Research into Classroom Practice, author Patricia Wolfe explains that most information only sticks in our brains for 15-20 seconds. But there are things you already do and more things you can try to make sure concepts stay in students' brains much longer than that. Consider the following from Wolfe's book:

Chunking
Working memory is limited but the limitations can be circumvented by our ability to "chunk" information.

For example: these letters are hard to remember - IB MJ FKTW AUS ACD, but when we chunk them like this IBM, JFK, TWA, USA, CD they're easier to remember. Although we cannot increase the number of chunks we can store, we can (by reorganizing or recoding) increase the amount of information that can be stored in each chunk.

Being able to see how information fits together in chunks is a hallmark of learning, but students need to make the connections themselves for the information to stick. 

Making Meaning using Associations
One of the most effective ways to make information meaningful is to associate or compare the new concept with a known concept, to hook the unfamiliar with something familiar. The most effective associations link new learning to something that is personally relevant to the student.

Emotion and Retention: Adding an emotional hook to learning
We remember for a longer time events that elicit emotions in us.

"If adrenaline [epinephrine] is released naturally (from the adrenal gland) in some situation, that experience will be remembered especially well." (Wolfe 106)

Teachers who have their students act out a particular event of history or form a mathematical equation using fellow students are increasing the chances of retention of the event or equation.

Read this week's blog for more suggestions and ways to apply these concepts to your teaching.