We're all familiar, I'm sure, with the use of worked-out examples in mathematics teaching. Worked-out examples are often used to demonstrate problem-solving processes. They generally specify the steps needed to solve a problem in some detail. After working through such examples, students are usually given the same kind of problems to work through on their own. The strategy is generally helpful in teaching students to solve problems that are the same as the examples.
I have previously reported on how gait and balance problems have been associated with white matter lesions, and walking speed and grip strength have been associated with dementia and stroke risk.
In the last part I talked about retrieval structures and their role in understanding what you’re reading. As promised, this month I’m going to focus on understanding scientific text in particular, and how it differs from narrative text.
The story method (sometimes called the sentence mnemonic) is the most easily learned list-mnemonic strategy, although it is not as widely known as the other simple methods we’ve talked about so far.
As its name suggests, the story method involves linking words to be learned in a story. While this is most obviously useful for learning actual lists, it can also be used for remembering the main points of a passage. In such a case, you need to reduce each point to a single word, which hopefully has the power to recall the whole point.
A study1 of nearly 2000 older adults has found that eating a Mediterranean diet was associated with less risk of developing mild cognitive impairment or of transitioning from MCI to Alzheimer's disease. The third with the highest scores for Mediterranean diet adherence had a 28% lower risk of developing MCI compared to the third with the lowest scores, and of those who already had MCI, those with the highest scores for Mediterranean diet adherence had a 48% less chance of developing Alzheimer’s.
"I'm terrible at remembering names"
"I'm great with names, but I'm hopeless at remembering what I've read."
"I always remember what people tell me about themselves, but I'm always forgetting birthdays and anniversaries."
There is no such thing as a poor memory!
There will be memory domains that you are less skilled at dealing with.
Think about the different types of information you have stored in your memory:
To use note-taking effectively, you need to understand that its primary value is not in the record you produce, it is in the process itself. The process of taking notes guides the memory codes you make. Note-taking is a strategy for making information meaningful. It is therefore only effective to the extent that you paraphrase, organize and make sense of the information while taking notes.
Do experts simply know "more" than others, or is there something qualitatively different about an expert's knowledge compared to the knowledge of a non-expert?
While most of us are not aiming for an expert's knowledge in many of the subjects we study or learn about, it is worthwhile considering the ways in which expert knowledge is different, because it shows us how to learn, and teach, more effectively.
As we all know, rhyme and rhythm help make information more memorable. Here's a few ideas that may help you use them more effectively.
Rhythm and rhyme are of course quite separate things, and are processed in different regions of the brain. However, they do share some commonalities in why and how they benefit memory. Rhyme and rhythm impose pattern. For that reason, rhyme and rhythm are particularly valuable when information is not inherently meaningful.
Humans are the animals that manipulate their cognitive environment.