Chapter 6 (PLE 4&5) : Cognitive Learning and Memory

PLE #4: What are the essential skills and/or learning outcomes you want your students to know and be able to do that relate to cognitive learning? 

I want students to be able to relate the information presented in a lesson to previous knowledge, to identify key points in the topic, and to be able to discuss these ideas at a later date. I also feel like it is important for students to generalize knowledge and skills, and to be able to apply prior knowledge to new concepts and procedures. All of this relies on students' ability to identify and store main ideas. Students need to be able to organize and filter main ideas from the large amount of visual, audio, and textual information they encounter at any given time. From there they must categorize and relate this information to something meaningful, in order to move it past their working memory into their long term memory, where it must be logged for retrieval in order for students to generalize their knowledge and apply it to new concepts. 


 PLE #5: How might your knowledge of the memory processes guide your instructional decisions?


I personally really wish I had been taught better memorization strategies early on in school. I never truly learned how to study and store information until my later years in college. In order to better help students with the instructional goals listed above, I would practice several strategies with them for encoding information and accessing previously learned info to build on. Before starting an activity I would work with students on identifying the main ideas took look out for in a lesson. If my subject was expressionist art I would question the students on their predictions for the lesson. Based on the last art movement we studied, what do you think might have been some key motivators for the expressionist movement? Do you know any expressionist artists? Lets look at the root word in expressionist: expression. What clues does that word give us about the art from this movement?

I would ask students to log their responses in their portfolio as prior knowledge and predictions. I would give them guided handouts to take notes on during the presentation, with organizational charts if the amount of information needed to be broken down into groups for better comprehension. At the end of each class I would go over what the students felt they had learned for the day, and ask them to relate it to previous knowledge we had gone over. 

10 helpful strategies for helping students' memorization.