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Why Do Students Remember Everything That’s on Television and Forget Everything I Say?

Your memory system lays its bets this way: if you think about something carefully, you’ll probably have to think about it again, so it should be stored.Thus your memory is not a product of what you want to remember or what you try to remember; it’s a product of what you think about.

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Memory is the residue of thought. To teach well, you should pay careful attention to what an assignment will actually make students think about (not what you hope they will think about), because that is what they will remember. 

The Importance of Memory  

Every teacher has had the following experience: you teach what you think is a terrific lesson, full of lively examples, deep content, engaging problems to solve, and a clear message, but the next day students remember nothing of it except a joke you told and an off-the-subject aside about your family—or worse, when you say, struggling to keep your voice calm, “The point of yesterday’s lesson was that one plus one equals two,” they look at you incredulously and say, “One plus one equals two?” Obviously, if the message of Chapter Two is “background knowledge matters,” then we must closely consider how we can make sure that students acquire this background knowledge. So why do students remember some things and forget other things? Let’s start by considering why you fail to remember something. Suppose I said to you, “Can you summarize the last professional development seminar you attended?” Let’s further suppose that you brightly answer, “Nope, I sure can’t.”Why don’t you remember? 

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If you don’t pay attention to something, you can’t learn it! You won’t remember much of the seminar if you were thinking about something else.

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For material to be learned (that is, to end up in long-term memory), it must reside for some period in working memory—that is, a student must pay attention to it. Further, how the student thinks of the experience completely determines what will end up in long-term memory.

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What Good Teachers Have In Common

Trying to make the material relevant to students’ interests doesn’t work. As I noted in Chapter One, content is seldom the decisive factor in whether or not our interest is maintained. For example, I love cognitive psychology, so you might think, “Well, to get Willingham to pay attention to this math problem, we’ll wrap it up in a cognitive psychology example.” But Willingham is quite capable of being bored by cognitive psychology, as has been proved repeatedly at professional conferences I’ve attended. Another problem with trying to use content to engage students is that it’s sometimes very difficult to do and the whole enterprise comes off as artificial. How would a math instructor make algebra relevant to my sixteen-year-old daughter? With a “real-world” example using cell phone minutes? I just finished pointing out that any material has different aspects of meaning. If the instructor used a math problem with cell phone minutes, isn’t there some chance that my daughter would think about cell phones rather than about the problem? And that thoughts about cell phones would lead to thoughts about the text message she received earlier, which would remind her to change her picture on her Facebook profile, which would make her think about the zit she has on her nose . . . ? So if content won’t do it, how about style? Students often refer to good teachers as those who “make the stuff interesting.” It’s not that the teacher relates the material to students’ interests—rather, the teacher has a way of interacting with students that they find engaging. Let me give a few examples from my own experience with fellow college-level teachers who are consistently able to get students to think about meaning.

Teacher A is the comedian. She tells jokes frequently. She never misses an opportunity to use a silly example. Teacher B is the den mother. She is very caring, very directive, and almost patronizing, but so warm that she gets away with it. Students call her “Mom” behind her back. Teacher C is the storyteller. He illustrates almost everything with a story from his life. Class is slow paced and low key, and he is personally quiet and unassuming. Teacher D is the showman. If he could set off fireworks inside, he would do it. The material he teaches does not lend itself easily to demonstrations, but he puts a good deal of time and energy into thinking up interesting applications, many of them involving devices he’s made at home. 

Each of these teachers is one to whom students refer as making boring material interesting, and each is able to get students to think about meaning. Each style works well for the person using it, although obviously not everyone would feel comfortable taking on some of these styles. It’s a question of personality. 

Style is what the students notice, but it is only a part of what makes these teachers so effective. College professors typically get written student evaluations of their teaching at the end of every course. Most schools have a form for students to fill out that includes such items as “The professor was respectful of student opinions,” “The professor was an effective discussion leader,” and so on, and students indicate whether or not they agree with each statement. Researchers have examined these sorts of surveys to figure out which professors get good ratings and why. One of the interesting findings is that most of the items are redundant. A two-item survey would be almost as useful as a thirty-item survey, because all of the questions really boil down to two: Does the professor seem like a nice person, and is the class well organized?  Although they don’t realize they are doing so, students treat each of the thirty items as variants of one of these two questions.

Although K-12 students don’t complete questionnaires about their teachers, we know that more or less the same thing is true for them.The emotional bond between students and teacher—for better or worse—accounts for whether students learn.The brilliantly well-organized teacher whom fourth graders see as mean will not be very effective. But the funny teacher, or the gentle storytelling teacher, whose lessons are poorly organized won’t be much good either. Effective teachers have both qualities. 

They are able to connect personally with students, and they organize the material in a way that makes it interesting and easy to understand.



READ MORE:

Styles, Abilities and Multiple Intelligences

Why Is It Hard to Make Students Think Like Experts?

Why Is It So Hard for Students to Understand Abstract Ideas?

Factual knowledge must precede skill

Why Don't Students Like School?

Memory

From the nature of these memory errors, and those documented in many other incidents he studied, Münsterberg fashioned a theory of memory. He believed that none of us can retain in memory the vast quantity of details we are confronted with at any moment in our lives and that our memory mistakes have a common origin: they are all artifacts of the techniques our minds employ to fill in the inevitable gaps. Those techniques include relying on our expectations and, more generally, on our belief systems and our prior knowledge. As a result, when our expectations, beliefs, and prior knowledge are at odds with the actual events, our brains can be fooled.

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Münsterberg published his ideas about memory in a book that became a best seller, On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime. In it, he elaborated on a number of key concepts that many researchers now believe correspond to the way memory really does work: first, people have a good memory for the general gist of events but a bad one for the details; second, when pressed for the unremembered details, even well-intentioned people making a sincere effort to be accurate will inadvertently fill in the gaps by making things up; and third, people will believe the memories they make up.

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Between them, Freud and Münsterberg had come up with theories of mind and memory that were of great importance, but unfortunately the men had little impact on each other: Freud understood much better than Münsterberg did the immense power of the unconscious, but he thought that repression, rather than a dynamic act of creation on the part of the unconscious, was the reason for the gaps and inaccuracies in our memory; while Münsterberg understood much better than Freud did the mechanics and the reasons for memory distortion and loss—but had no sense at all of the unconscious processes that created them.