Human Memory and Knowledge Construction: Increases in Student Learning Essay

It is essential to help students effectively store and retrieve information from their long-term memory. Human memory is related to the way information is received, interpreted, stored, and retrieved. In short, information is brought into the sensory register. The stimulus then moves into the working memory and is then stored in the long-term memory. An understanding of Piaget’s theory of knowledge construction helps teachers to guide meaningful lessons and conversations that maximize student learning. It is therefore crucial that teachers understand human memory and learning as well as strategies to enhance these aspects in the classroom to support student learning. An understanding of memory is essential for teaching students. Memory is the process of storing and retrieving information and behaviors. Human memory has several components that are essential for effective storage and retrieval. Storage is the process of taking what was presented and placing it in a location in the brain’s storage space for later retrieval. Retrieval is the process of recalling the information that was previously stored. One way to think about this part of memory is to think of the brain like a file system. Although it is not entirely accurate, this analogy works to describe parts of the storage and retrieval process. In this way, the brain is like a filing cabinet. There are files for many concepts and the information is stored according to these files. This is a person’s schema; Schema is an organized set of information about a topic. For example, a person could have a schema for beaches. This schema would contain information such as white sand, the sound of seagulls, and tide pools. If this was a file system, there would be a file labeled beaches, and inside of that file would be information, pictures, and memorabilia related to beaches. One way that human memory is different from a filing system is that one piece of information could be stored in connection to more than one schema. One way to think about this is like a web, where the central idea is in the center, and ideas and information come from the center into sub categories. These subcategories can also have other subcategories, and can be connected to other ideas and concepts. Retrieval is related to the filing system, also. In this way, when a person is looking for information, they go to the file where the information is stored and pull out what they need. When a person is retrieving information for their memory, they use retrieval cues in a similar manner. Retrieval cues are stimuli that help people recall information. This too is related to a person’s schema as well as the web analogy. In this way, when a person smells a certain scent, like pine trees, they pull forward all the schemas that contain the smell of pine trees. This allows the brain to go through a smaller amount of stored information for a faster retrieval. In this example, schemas of Christmas, the woods, and grandma’s house may be brought forward. When information is not stored in an appropriate schema, retrieval is more difficult and slower than if it were stored in a memorable place. This is important for student education and the teaching process. It is important for teachers to help students to store information learned in class in order to improve retrieval and make connections across schemas. There are three places that a stimulus can go. The first is the sensory register. This is where the brain decides whether or not the stimulus is necessary for a person to consciously consider. This means that some things make it to the working memory and some things are ignored. This is important because people are exposed to many stimuli at the same time and if attention was paid to all of them, the person would not be able to concentrate on any given stimulus. This is often a large problem for students with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Students who have ADD are viewed as being unable to concentrate on their school work. The actual problem is that students with ADD are paying attention to many stimuli making it difficult to concentrate on a single stimulus. Students who have ADD often have trouble with their sensory register because it does not ignore the unnecessary stimuli of their surroundings, such as noise in the hallway, leaves quivering on a tree outside, or the sound of a noisy heater. Once a stimulus has been deemed worthy of consideration by the sensory register it moves into the working memory. This is where meaningful thinking occurs and connections are made, before the information is stored in the long term memory. This is where students need help making sense of information. The working memory is like a Post-it note. The initial idea is placed on the Post-it. Information can then be added to the Post-it, attached to other Post-its, or moved to another place to make a connection. Students need to be guided to make connections and understand the presented information. Long term memory is where the information is stored for later retrieval. Once a person has processed the information in the working memory and made connections to prior knowledge and experiences, the brain then stores the information accordingly. Effective storage requires that the information is stored according to schemas for retrieval. For example, when I was traveling in Misiones, Argentina, I came across a strange animal. Looking at this animal, it looked like a mix of a raccoon and an anteater. It had a long tail like a lemur and sat like a bear cub. Later I discovered that this animal is called a Coatà ­. The Coatà ­, therefore, is stored in my long term memory, in relation to schemas about Misiones, Argentina, animals, and tropical forests. In chapter two of Ormrod’s (2012) book, Essentials of Educational Psychology Big Ideas to Guide Effective Teaching, Ormrod describes three processes for effectively storing information in long term memory. These processes will be discussed in relation to the case study. The case study involved a teacher, Mrs. Dennison, and her class, as they discovered endangered species. Mrs. Dennison uses many different techniques to help her students to learn this material. The first process is elaboration. This is where the receiver takes the information that they have been presented with and supplements it with realistic hypotheses to more deeply understand the concept. These hypotheses come from relationships with other prior knowledge. Ms. Dennison shows the class a video to introduce the concept of endangered species. She begins with a video on manatees. This is an unfamiliar topic for students. She then guides the students through questioning, to elaborate on the presented information. The students are then able to make connections to what they already know about animals. For example, Ms. Dennison asks â€Å"is the manatee like anything you’ve ever seen before?† and â€Å"How big is the manatee compared to you?† She also asks her students how they think that manatees swim and later asks why manatees do not live as far north as Canada. The second process is organization. The process of organization is where a person makes connections between ideas. Under the umbrella of endangered species, Ms. Dennison introduces manatees. She then introduces loggerhead turtles. Using a matrix, Ms. Dennison guides her students to comparing and contrasting the two endangered animals. She also does this using the maps. This map shows the overlap of the habitats of the two animals and also where the loggerhead turtle can live that manatees cannot. The final storage process suggested by Ormrod is visual imagery. This process involves a person creating a picture in his or her mind either from the way he or she imagines it looks or from being exposed to images of the concept. Ms. Dennison helps her students to use this process by using videos and images. In the beginning of the unit, Ms. Dennison uses a video on manatees to introduce students to manatees and endangered species. She asks students to relate what the manatee looked like in the video to something else that they had seen before. She shows a video about loggerhead turtles as well as tapes a picture of the loggerhead turtle in the description column of the matrix. Ms. Dennison used these strategies for storing information in conjunction with the three component memory system. Initially the information is brought into the sensory register. This comes from the videos. The information is deemed as important and therefore moves to the working memory. To help students take the information from the sensory register to the working memory, the teacher asks students to make observations. Here the teacher guides the students to organize and elaborate on the information to be stored in long term memory. The teacher helps the students to make connections to prior knowledge, create new knowledge through hypotheses, and organize the information for effective storage and retrieval. She does this through class discussions, the use of the matrix and map, and making meaningful connections to the things the students were already familiar with. The teacher leads the students to move the information from the working memory to the long-term memory. By helping students to organize the information into appropriate schemas, the teacher helps the students to successfully store the information into their long-term memory. She is doing this by using the matrix and maps as well as comparing and contrasting the animals. She also helps the students to practice their retrieval skills when she asks them to recall the previously discussed definitions such as habitat. The methods used by Ms. Dennison will be effective for long-term memory storage and successful retrieval because she uses all three methods for long-term memory storage. She helps the students to create meaningful connections allowing the information to be stored in many different schemas. She also helped students to create their own schema for endangered species. Within that schema, using the matrix, classroom discussions, and map, she is able to guide students to create subcategories of the schema for each animal as well as the environmental implications. The systemized organization of the schema will help students perform effective and efficient retrieval for future reference. Piaget, a researcher from Switzerland, devoted his life to understanding the way children develop cognitively. Piaget’s theory of knowledge construction is based in the notion that children are motivated to learn by disequilibrium. Piaget explained that when a student is in disequilibrium he or she feels uncomfortable and needs to return to equilibrium. This shift is made through accommodation and assimilation. Assimilation is when a person takes an unknown stimulus and fits it to an existing schema. For example, when a young child is presented with an unknown animal, such as a zebra, he or she is in disequilibrium because he or she is unsure what kind of animal it is. After observing the zebra, the child discovers that the zebra has many characteristics of a horse. In order to get back into equilibrium, the child decides that the zebra is a horse. Here the child assimilates the information into the existing schema of horse. Accommodation is when a person creates a new schema or reorganizes an existing schema to harbor the new information. Returning to the child who sees a zebra for the first time, to accommodate this new animal into a schema the child decides that the zebra is not a horse but a new animal all together. The child then creates a new schema for zebras that contains information regarding how the zebra is similar to and different than a horse. Piaget’s theory of knowledge construction is apparent in the case study. Ms. Dennison recognizes that because of the geographic location of her students, manatees, loggerhead turtles, and other endangered species may not be something that the students are familiar with, thus causing disequilibrium. In order to help her students to get back into equilibrium Ms. Dennison helps her students to accommodate the information. One way that she does this is by asking the student to relate the manatee to something that they are familiar with. Keri suggests that a manatee is like a cow. Being from Wisconsin, this is something that many students can relate to. Ms. Dennison explains that manatees are often called sea cows. If she would have stopped the discussion there students may have assimilated the information. She does not, however. Instead, she discusses the differences between manatees and cows with the students. One example is that cows have legs and manatees do not. This leads students to accommodate the new information; This helps students to create a new schema for manatees. This brings students back to equilibrium. She then discusses the characteristics and habitat of manatees and organizes this information into a matrix. The students are then able to add this information to their new schema. This organization will help students to retrieve the information later. There are other strategies that would be helpful for Ms. Dennison to use that would help to increase her students’ learning, as suggested by Ormrod. One thing that she could do would be to suggest mnemonics for information that may be difficult to remember later. One example of a mnemonic that she could use in this unit would be HIPPO. This acronym is used to remember the causes of extinction for animals. It stands for habitat, introduction of an exotic species, pollution, population, and over consumption. Another way that Ms. Dennison could help her students would be to provide a hands-on experience to relate to the concept. This could be done within this unit by having students think of ways to conserve their environment, raise money to save a species, or write letters to government officials expressing their concern about the wellbeing of the species. Human memory has many aspects. Storage and retrieval are both essential in this process. The use of schemas can improve storage and retrieval. The three-component model of memory is a good descriptor of the process. A stimulus is initially taken into the sensory register, when it is deemed important the stimuli then moves into the working memory where it is organized, interpreted, and connected to other prior knowledge. The information is then stored in long-term memory, where it awaits retrieval. There are three significant processes that are useful for storing information in long-term memory: organization, elaboration, and visual imagery. Piaget’s theory of knowledge construction is an essential understanding for teachers to perceive student learning through accommodation and assimilation as students move from disequilibrium to equilibrium. There are many strategies that help students effectively learn, store, and retrieve information. It is imperative that teachers help students to complete this process in order for meaningful learning to take place. References Ormrod, J. (2012). Learning, cognition, and memory. In Essentials of educational psychology: big ideas to guide effective teaching (3rd ed., pp. 16-55). Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.