The more a learner focuses on the meaning of information being
presented, the more elaborately he or she will process the information. This
principle is so obvious that it is easy to miss. What it means is this: When
you are trying to drive a piece of information into your brain’s memory
systems, make sure you understand exactly what that information means. If
you are trying to drive information into someone else’s brain, make sure
they understand exactly what it means. The corollary is true as well. If you
don’t know what the learning means, don’t try to memorize the information
by rote and pray the meaning will somehow reveal itself. And don’t expect
your students will do this either, especially if you have done an inadequate
job of explaining things. This is like attempting
to remember words by
looking at the number of diagonal lines in the words.
Use real-world examples
How does one communicate meaning in such a fashion that learning is
improved? A simple trick involves the liberal use of relevant real-world
examples, thus peppering main learning points with meaningful
experiences.
As a student, you can do this while studying after class.
Teachers can do it during the actual learning experience.
Numerous studies show this works. In one experiment, groups of
students read a 32-paragraph paper about a fictitious foreign country. The
introductory paragraphs in the paper were highly structured. They contained
either no examples, one example, or two or three consecutive examples of
the main theme that followed. The greater the
number of examples in the
paragraph, the more likely the students were to remember the information.
It’s best to use real-world situations familiar to the learner. Remember
wonderful Aunt Mabel’s apple pie? That wasn’t an abstract food cooked by
a stranger; it was real food cooked by a loving relative. The more personal
an example, the more richly it becomes encoded and the more readily it is
remembered.
Examples work because they take advantage of the brain’s natural
predilection for pattern matching. Information is more readily processed if
it can be immediately associated with information already present in the
brain. We compare the two inputs, looking for similarities and differences
as we encode the new information. Providing
examples is the cognitive
equivalent of adding more handles to the door. Providing examples makes
the information more elaborative, more complex, better encoded, and
therefore better learned.
Start with a compelling introduction
Introductions are everything. As an undergraduate, I had a professor
who can thoughtfully be described as a lunatic. He taught a class on the
history of cinema, and one day he decided to illustrate for us how art films
traditionally depict emotional vulnerability. As he went through the lecture,
he literally began taking off his clothes. He first
took off his sweater and
then, one button at a time, began removing his shirt, down to his T-shirt. He
unzipped his trousers, and they fell around his feet, revealing, thank
goodness, gym clothes. His eyes were shining as he exclaimed, “You will
probably never forget now that some films use
physical nudity to express
emotional vulnerability. What could be more vulnerable than being naked?”
We were thankful that he gave us no further details of his example. I will
never forget the introduction to this unit in my film class (not that I’m
endorsing its specifics). But its memorability illustrates the timing
principle: The events that happen the first time you are exposed to
information play a disproportionately greater role in your ability to
accurately retrieve it at a later date. If you are
trying to get information
across to someone, a compelling introduction may be the most important
single factor in the success of your mission. Why this emphasis on the
initial moments? Because the memory of an
event is stored in the same
places initially recruited to perceive it.
Other professions have stumbled onto this notion. Budding directors are
told by their film instructors that the audience needs to be hooked in the
first three minutes after the opening credits to make the film compelling
(and financially successful). Public speaking professionals say that you win
or lose the battle to hold your audience in the first 30 seconds of a given
presentation.
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