Memory plays a role in what your students learn. By this, I don’t mean to imply that success on your course should require ‘memorisation’. Rather, it is to say that key processes of human memory are involved in learning, and these underpin what students understand and retain. Knowing how these processes work can us to help our students.

Psychologists agree that for things to be retained over the long term, they must be represented in long-term memory. This applies to skills as well as to factual knowledge. Consider, for example, a situation where students are discussing how to tackle a research problem, and they make a breakthrough. This is complex, higher-order thinking, but it must still be retained. After all, if the students immediately forget about their discussion, they will have to make the breakthrough all over again!

There are certain features of long-term memory which are highly relevant to your teaching or lecturing, and to your students’ success. Indeed, misconceptions about these areas may currently be undermining academic progress.

The good news is that all of these things are easy to address. For the most part, they only require slight tweaks to current practice. For the rest of this post, I want to explain how to get around these potential pitfalls.

1) Forgetting

After initial learning, forgetting proceeds very rapidly. This means that if quizzed immediately after a lecture or class, students generally feel quite confident about what they have learned. However, much of what has been covered will soon be forgotten.

If consolidation only happens very soon after the initial period of study (for example, by doing reading or checking notes on the same evening as a lecture), nothing is done to arrest later forgetting. By the time exams or assignments come around, learners may be almost back to square one!

This is a highly inefficient way to learn. However, it can be tackled by changing the time when things are practised. Delaying practice makes use of what researchers call the spacing effect. Practising too soon is ineffective. A delayed practice session consolidates previously-studied material when it is on the point of being forgotten.

Colleagues should therefore be wary of covering a topic intensively in a single day. Learners often won’t make good choices about when to study, but we can build this into a course by (for example):

- Holding a follow-up seminar at least a week after an initial lecture;

- Devoting some class time to integrating material from across several previous sessions;

- Using quizzes, reviews, or other consolidation tasks after a delay, rather than straight away.

2) Shallow learning

In addition to forgetting something outright, a student may remember it in a way that is shallow and inflexible.

Learners and instructors alike often believe that something has been permanently learned in practice session, when they are actually witnessing short-term performance.

True learning is long lasting, flexible, and can be applied in new situations. It is at play when students are able to make links with previous learning, or apply methodological or statistical skills creatively. This means that these things have been learned. What we often observe at the end of a class is that learners can answer questions and are beginning to grasp the new material, but haven’t yet fully consolidated it.

This difference between performance and learning is counterintuitive. Educators often assume that a high degree of success at a task is a good sign, when in fact, things that lead to good performance are typically worse for learning (Soderstrom & Bjork, 2015).

We should therefore be wary of making tasks too easy. For example:

Copying from a slide is easier than recalling things and summarising them from memory.
Re-reading notes is easier than testing yourself.
Stating facts is easier than categorising/drawing comparisons.
Listening to a lecturer verbally summarise a topic is easier than answering a review quiz on the topic.
In each of these cases, the harder task will have more of an effect on learning, but will be slower and lead to more mistakes. We should also be wary of providing too much help, as it can undermine active learning

Together, these ideas suggest that colleagues should also avoid viewing successful performance in a seminar or tutorial as the end of the story. It’s also important to give learners opportunities to integrate what they have studied with other material in later sessions, and to deepen their understanding.

3) Flawed study habits

We can probably assume that most students engage in private, self-regulated study away from class. However, it is likely that they rely on ineffective study strategies. For example, Karpicke et al (2009) found that re-reading was by far the most-used study strategy among their sample of undergraduates, even though it is considered far less effective than things like spacing out your practice, or self-testing (Dunlosky et al, 2013).

What’s more, most students don’t appear to have received much guidance on how to study more effectively. In a survey by psychologists Kornell and Bjork (2007), only 20% of students reported studying the way that they did because they had been advised to study that way. Most are figuring out how to study by themselves.

If we leave study habits up to student preferences, they will probably fail to account for forgetting, and will choose easy strategies that boost performance rather than learning – strategies such as re-reading and highlighting their notes, for example.

They may also fail to return to material after initially studying it, incorrectly thinking that once is enough.

Study habits that we might encourage instead include:

Returning to materials to consolidate them after a delay.
Engaging in active learning strategies such as self-questioning and summarising.
Self-testing, for example by engaging in a ‘brain dump’ where they write down everything they can recall from an article or video.
Looking for opportunities to critique, combine and categorise materials, and discussing these with peers and lecturers.
Such habits will be more active – and more effective than what most students are currently doing.

Overall, it is important to realise that while the functioning of long-term memory is complex and often counterintuitive, there are things that we can do to improve how well students retain ideas and skills. These techniques are very well established in the research literature, and often quite easy to do. Spacing out and consolidating learning, for example, does not lead to any extra costs or require changes to the study material itself (Firth, 2021). As such, modifications that change the method and timing of learning and benefit long-term memory present a very appealing CPD opportunity for teachers and lecturers.

References

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.

Firth, J. (2021). Boosting learning by changing the order and timing of classroom tasks: Implications for professional practice. Journal of Education for Teaching, 47(1), 32–46.

Karpicke, J. D., Butler, A. C., & Roediger III, H. L. (2009). Metacognitive strategies in student learning: do students practise retrieval when they study on their own?. Memory, 17(4), 471–479.

Kornell, N., & Bjork, R. A. (2007). The promise and perils of self-regulated study. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14(2), 219–224.

Soderstrom, N. C., & Bjork, R. A. (2015). Learning versus performance: An integrative review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 176–199.