Key To Success Is Memory
One of the key tools your child needs to succeed in school and life, is a good memory. Children fortunate enough to have good memories are ahead of the academic game. Memory is necessary for learning. Without a good memory, learning is a moot point. Many of us think memory is simply recall of specific dates or facts. But, in reality, memory is not one dimensional, it focuses on attending, learning, linking, remembering, and using all knowledge and skills we have acquired. In school, memory is the only evidence that a given lesson has been learned. The teacher can “teach” the student skills, but the student has to learn the skill. And… that takes memory. First, the teacher must make sure the student is attending to learning, can attach new skills to previous learning, is actively engaged, in order to construct meaning, and able to demonstrate what they have learned. Students must be able to organize, store, and retrieve information.
Brain research tells us how the brain learns and remembers. To remember information, we must first process and interpret sensory data into a form that can be recalled. This data comes to us through sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. Next, it must pass through short term or our working memory. The third step is to store it into long term memory, in a way it can be retrieved. When a child listens the teacher, reads a book, smells food from nearby, taste a snack and writes on a paper, the senses are overloaded. It is necessary for to filter out the unnecessary stimuli, in order to hold on to the stimuli necessary for learning a particular lesson. The sensory memory, can hold lots of information, but only for a brief time. Attention plays a key role in moving the sensory information to short term memory. Anything that does not get the child’s attention… disappears from the memory.
How much information can a child process at one time? Only a small amount of information can be attended to at any one time. While two or three well-learned tasks can be done at one time, more complex tasks require more attention. Taking directions from the teacher, if complex, will impair the child’s ability to remember what to do with an assignment. Thus, if a child is given too much complex stimuli, the ability to pay attention my be impaired, resulting in storing nothing to short term memory.
Short term memory is where a child holds the information, while deciding what it means… and what to do with it. It is here, that the brain tries to make sense of the information and/or solve the problem. Here, the information is rehearsed over and over. The problem with short term memory is the fact that it is limited in the amount of information that can be held, and it does not keep information for a long period of time.
Next week we will continue discovering how memory works for your child. With this information, we can devise strategies to enhance the art of memory.
