As Ed Cooke( 2012), director of the Memrise website and app observes, mnemonics enable a‘ vivid mental shorthand( because) anything that grabs our attention in the outside world will also do so in our inner world of memory. […] beauty, ugliness, violence, colour, suddenness, nakedness or humour evoke emotion and energise us.’ There are many mnemonics: I will be focusing on acronyms and association, method of loci, the use of images, songs and rhymes.
Memories are made of this: Mnemonics in Sevenoaks teaching and learning, and beyond
Rod Rands-Webb Teacher of French, Spanish and Theory of Knowledge
Travellers on the journeys of teaching and learning are naturally invested in finding ways to retain and recall vital information, be they staff or students. As we alight at each station stop on our way up the‘ D. I. K. W.’ pyramid,( attributed to Czech educator Milan Zeleny: data, information, knowledge and, eventually, wisdom), learners aim to acquire and keep the learning that is most useful to them by any and all practical, personal and, ideally, fun, means.
This article will investigate the memory aids we call mnemonics: looking back on the memory aids many of us know and can’ t forget, sharing recent thinking about mnemonics with a survey of Sevenoaks teaching practitioners’ favourite, most successful ways to support students, and reflecting on why past and present methods work.
By way of example, incorporating acronyms and association, one of our teachers of biology created‘ Dead Mouse Ice Cream’. It gives her students a dynamic way to remember the difference between the dependent variable( the height that a sunflower grows) and the independent variable( how far from the window to keep the flowerpot) in an investigation.‘ Dead Mouse Ice Cream’ may seem grotesque or even silly, but it is vindicated by ensuring learners retain that the Dependent is what you Measure, and the Independent is what you Change. This has been adopted and enhanced by others in the department, creating a playful image to put in PowerPoints, with all year groups from Year 7, to help them. Its graphic impact on working memory pushes it deeper into longer-term memory by metaphorically dressing up those technical terms in memorable clothes. Hearing this success story being repeated as best practice in school, reminded me of my boys’ school beginnings in Spanish: our teacher needed us to remember that the only consonants one can double in Spanish orthography are C, R, L and N. A poster of a Spanish lady on the classroom wall was labelled doña Carolina and each hispanist who doubled other incorrect consonants was exhorted to gaze upon her. Even if we cringe now, seeing this through 21st century eyes, the mnemonic( if not the poster) worked for that class and is still helping our linguists to proofread more accurately. One study( Putnam. A, 2015) found that in an exam a week after being given acronym mnemonics, students who reported using the acronyms( 64 % of the class) averaged 70 % correct on the acronym-related questions compared with 56 % for students who did not report using acronyms( the two groups did not differ on the non-acronym questions).
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