The Memory Problem

You are helping Jace study for his Spanish test tomorrow. You are going over the vocabulary together. He made note cards several nights ago, but when you try to test him without the notecards, it seems he knows nothing.

Truth: Many students are not encoding information well enough into their long-term memory. Without the proper memory hooks, memories can be made both incorrectly or singularly. In the case of Jace he may know the vocabulary really well when tested on the words using his note cards because he may have memorized the ordering, and the visuals of the letters on the front and back. But Jace still needs that cue in order to recall the word. Jace cannot respond to his mom's quizzing because he doesn't have this cue. In fact, Jace and his mom now know Jace has not made strong enough memory hooks to recall the information on command in another form (in this case auditorily).

What I Suggest: Help Jace make proper memory hooks. Using multiple formats to manipulate information helps encode it correctly and for longer. For studying this Spanish vocabulary, Jace needs to identify what is interesting, similar, different, or unique about the words he is having trouble remembering and make memory associations. For instance, Jace cannot remember what the word "nueva" means in English. To help Jace build his memory hook help him identify: maybe"Nueva" has an "N" just like it's definition "new", or maybe "Nueva" sounds like "new wave". Help Jace draw his memory connection: maybe a wave with  both "new wave" and "nueva" written on the image. Hooking new or unfamiliar information with old or encoded information will allow Jace to answer "new" every time he sees, hears, or thinks of the word "nueva" (and vice-a-versa). 




Reply to this post if you'd like some visual examples of the memory hook strategies I mentioned above.