I had the rare opportunity to sit down last night and play all of the memory games that were listed on the Cognitive Module. The memory games proved that I remember best when I (like most people) repeat information back in an auditory way. At the end, all I kept thinking was: What has happened to my memory? Do I have brain overload? How am I going to place all that I still have left to learn?
So the question for the day is: How can I (as a special educator) create a cognitive learning environment for my students? The majority of the students I work with struggle with applying concepts they have been taught to different situations. I recently had my parent-teacher conferences, and I felt as if I were a broken record saying: "Your child has difficulty holding on to information...Your child struggles with applying new information to different situations...Your child..." I'm not a parent, but I'm trying to imagine what parents do with that type of information about their children. What can parents do about this?
Recently, my co-teacher had a talk with our studenrs (5th graders) about test taking, trying to figure out why a majority of the kids did poorly on a math test. After the disucssion, and without pre-planning, she orally stated a list of 5 numbers. Later on that day, she asked if anyone remembered those numbers. About 10 our of the 25 kids were able to recite the numbers in correct order. She then explained to the kids about the fact that our brains processes information in different ways, and we should start to have an understanding of how best our brain stores information. What a great metacognition lesson!
Having kids be aware of how they store and retrieve information is a great start to helping them encode information more meaningfully to long term memory. With the amount of info being thrown to them at school, at home, online, and on television, kids need more of an awareness of differentiating between essential and nonessential information.
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4 comments:
I also am a special education teacher. I like that you are trying to help yourselves and students be aware of the different ways that everyone learns.
So how many tries did it take you to guess the correct penny? I couldn't believe I didn't get it on the first try, I was so positive I was right. About 9 tries later I finally got it! Doesn't matter how many times you see something, it doesn't get stored in long term memory if you don't encode it right!
Being a special education teacher it is very frustrating when the students forget what you just taught them...maybe they never learned it? I try so many different tricks....and they work for some and not for others. I suppose that is why we the teachers are constantly trying to learn new techniques..
I was horrible at the penny! It took me forever, and like you all I could think about was "WHERE DID MY MEMORY GO?"
I think it's it's interesting the way that certain techniques and "tricks" work for one person, and not another . . . if only there was one that I could find for me!
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