The “important peculiarities” of memory
Four key ways memory shapes learning
One of the most important things educators need to know about learning is that human memory is not like a tape recorder or a computer. It has what Bjork and Bjork call “important peculiarities”, four of which are really important to know when planning teaching.
(1) Memory has a "remarkable capacity for storing information coupled with a highly fallible retrieval process" (Bjork & Bjork, 2006)
In other words, while we can store a wealth of information, the mechanisms for recalling that information are imperfect and prone to error. We often think we know something when we don't really know it at all. This is the main reason why cognitive science has focused so much on the spacing effect and retrieval practice as they are powerful tools for helping students to remember stuff for the exam in June that they were taught in September.
(2) What can be accessed from memory at any one time is "heavily dependent on the current environmental, interpersonal, emotional, and body-state cues"
Remembering is not a static process but a dynamic one, influenced by a person's situation and state at the time of recall. This has important implications for learning and memory, indicating that the conditions under which information is learned can affect how well it is remembered later.
So lessons where there are a lot of activities/props etc. such as students doing a crime scene investigation or rewriting Shakespeare in text messages, lessons which are usually thought of as 'memorable' may not actually be memorable at all - it may seem like learning is happening but actually students are probably experiencing something rather than learning it. It's also important to note here that if students are hungry then learning is diminished. Alarmingly, the recent PISA results showed that 11% of pupils in the UK misses a meal at least once a week. The OECD average is 8%.
(3) The act of retrieving information from memory is a "dynamic process that alters the subsequent state of the system" When we remember something, we almost rewrite it again.
This is why memory is so untrustworthy. Remembering is an active process that can reinforce or modify the retrieved memory. This was Frederic Bartlett's big discovery 100 years ago when he came up with schema theory. The important point here is that successfully retrieving a memory can strengthen its future recovery, making future retrievals easier.
(4) Access to competing memory representations regresses over time – "that is, with the passage of time and accompanying intervening events, memory representations learned earlier become more accessible and competing memory representations learned more recently become less accessible"
This is somewhat of a paradox: we can sometimes forget things we learned yesterday but perfectly recall something from our childhood such as our times tables. As time passes, the memories that were formed earlier may become more easily accessible than the ones formed more recently. This could be due to a variety of factors, such as the strengthening of older memories through repeated retrieval or the contextual cues. Again, this is why retrieval practice and the spacing effect are so crucial to long-term learning
The key takeaway here is that we should view retrieval as a learning event. Retrieval practice is not so much about testing whether someone knows something but rather a core part of actually learning that something, a process which occurs across time and space. When we 'learn' something by reading it or being taught it, we don't learn it in that moment, we learn it across a number of episodes yet to happen in the future. This is why thinking carefully about curriculum and how to review and recall learned material is so, so crucial. Ultimately, educators should be aware that memory is a highly dynamic process in which memories are not recalled like a tape recorder or from a computer hard-drive but rather reshaped and consolidated according to how we access them.
Work cited: Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (2006). Optimizing treatment and instruction: Implications of a new theory of disuse. In L.-G. Nilsson & N. Ohta (Eds.), Memory and society: Psychological perspectives (pp. 116–140). Psychology Press.