Psychology in the Classroom

A Teacher's Guide to What Works

Marc Smith, Jonathan Firth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138059696
• eBook ISBN: 9781351671125
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Written by experienced classroom practitioners who are experts in the field of psychology, Psychology in the Classroom provides a thorough grounding in the key principles of psychology and explores how they can be applied to teaching and learning. It draws on both classic and cutting-edge research, offering practical advice on commonly overlooked or misunderstood concepts that contribute to positive academic outcomes. It aims to show the value of psychology in enabling teachers to make and justify everyday classroom decisions.

Designed to equip teachers with the skills to identify and tackle common issues that affect students' learning, each chapter highlights key areas of research and discusses how lesson planning and material design can be informed by the psychological concepts presented. It covers core areas essential for improving learning, including:

• memory and understanding;
• creativity;
• motivation;
• independent learning;
• resilience;
• cognition; and
• self-theories and mindsets.

Full of advice and strategies, Psychology in the Classroom is aimed at both new and experienced teachers, across primary, secondary and post-16 education, providing them with practical ways to apply these psychological principles in the classroom. With an emphasis on understanding the theories and evidence behind human behaviour, this book will allow you to reflect critically on your own classroom practice, as well as making simple but valuable changes.

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1	Memory and understanding

How does information enter the memory, to be remembered and understood over the long term? This chapter explains the key psychological processes and concepts involved. In particular, it covers:

● The types of long-term memory there are, and why there are so many misconceptions about memory.

● Schemas, and the role of meaningful information in recall.

● The importance of learner attention levels, and of context.

● How the spacing effect and retrieval practice effect can be applied.

● Applications of key theories of memory to lesson and course planning.

● What constitutes good learning habits on the part of learners.

Memory is essential to the process of education. If our learners don’t remember anything (i.e. if our teaching activities do not have a lasting impact on their abilities), then why do it at all?

In fact, to say that our teaching should have an effect on memory is a very minimal ambition. We want it to have a positive effect, and one beyond that which would have been achieved if we had not done anything at all; after all, children will always learn something, whether they are at school or not. As teachers, then, what we do in the classroom can be seen in terms of the long-term changes that our activities engender in learners, allowing them to develop and retain knowledge, understanding and skills that they will be able to transfer to new situations.

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It is important to clarify that psychology uses the term ‘memory’ very broadly to include any lasting change in thought processes or behaviour. It does not imply meaningless memorisation, and this chapter is certainly not advocating more rote repetition of isolated facts. As will be seen, meaningful connections between prior knowledge and new learning is an essential facet of learning, making it much more likely that new concepts or skills will be retained. The term also applies to a learner’s beliefs, understandings and skills, not just their factual learning.

If our work as teachers is to have positive and long-term effects on our learners, it is essential that we understand how human memory works. However, the research literature into memory is large and complex, and many findings are counterintuitive. In addition, the research has developed rapidly in recent years, and despite the value of professional judgement, we cannot rely just on intuition when the effects of an intervention may not be apparent to learners or teachers, or may not manifest itself until a later point. This chapter aims to help teachers to understand the science of memory, and to show how it can be applied in everyday classroom situations.

Why key aspects of memory are not intuitive

What exactly is meant by memory being ‘counterintuitive’? Memory defies expectations, we cannot reliably figure out how it works just from experience, and this is especially true of long-term memory (henceforth LTM) (Bjork, 2011). We cannot fully understand human memory simply through our own subjective experience; how the human brain takes in and stores information is primarily a matter of fact, and this field of study continues to yield surprises after decades of careful experimentation. Developing a professional understanding of how memory works is made more difficult in that the results, by definition, are not immediate, and there are important instances where short-term gains are a very unreliable guide to long-term learning (Soderstrom and Bjork, 2015).

It is also hindered by a set of misleading everyday analogies that liken the human mind to a computer’s data processor. We talk of ‘encoding’ information to memory, ‘storage’, ‘processing’ and ‘retrieval’. In reality, human memory is not a simple means of recording information, and things we have learned do not stay there in memory in the same format until we are ready to recall them. In short, human memory is very different from a hard drive or video recorder!

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Some examples of inaccurate popular assumptions include:

● We remember things more or less as they were shown to us. There is now a large body of evidence to show that information is distorted as soon as we begin to remember it, and some of our ‘memories’ never actually happened (Loftus, 2005).

● Children are like ‘sponges’, and remember things better than adults. In studies of eyewitnesses to a crime, it has been shown that children are highly susceptible to leading questions and false information (Schacter, 2001).

● The more you repeat something, the better you will remember it. It is now known that short-term memory is not a reliable gateway to LTM. Going over things repeatedly results in increased confidence without long-term improvements (Kornell etal., 2011), while simply repeating information does not guarantee entry to LTM (Dempster, 1996).

Structure of long-term memory

LTM can be defined as an evolved group of neurocognitive systems involved in the permanent storage of information, understandings, skills and actions in order to retrieve them for future use. It is therefore very broad, involved in everything that draws on previously learned skills and knowledge, and therefore in almost everything we do, from preparing breakfast to discussing politics. In school, learners are drawing on memory when they read, play sports and follow rules, as well as in more obvious situations such as memorising the lines to a play or answering an exam question. And as will be seen in Chapter 4, retention of factual knowledge also plays a key role in creativity.

A complication with understanding LTM is that it is responsible for several apparently quite different functions. Figure 1.1 helps to illustrate this point by showing some of the different subsystems of LTM, together with the separate brain areas that they are associated with.

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Figure 1.1 Subsystems of LTM with associated brain areas

Source: Squire (2004)

As can be seen, there are different types of LTM associated with different functions. Importantly for the teacher, LTM can be split into declarative memory (they know it and can explain it) and non-declarative memory (they have learned it, but cannot necessarily explain how or when; an improvement at playing a musical instrument is one example, as is an emotional association). Therefore, although learning in schools is often linked especially to declarative memory for facts and events, other types of LTM such as memory for procedures and skills are important too, particularly in certain disciplines. However, there are also more basic associative and emotional learning processes that should not be ignored.

As can also be inferred from the diagram, encoding things to LTM involves a change in one or more of the relevant brain areas. Although the details of how this happens are still not fully understood by neuroscientists, we know that it must happen. All of our thoughts and behaviour arise from brain processes – the interaction of neurons, primarily – so if you think differently, remember something new or improve at a skill, a physical change must have taken place within your brain. As might be imagined, this process can be relatively slow, and needs to be consolidated over time. It’s not essential for teachers to have a detailed understanding of neuroscience, but it is worth keeping in mind the general context: all of the memory processes described throughout this book involve the brain, and while a pupil can retain and process unfamiliar information over the short term, no new learning is possible without permanent changes taking place on a neural level.

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What are the key principles of memory and understanding?

Clearly, a person’s ability to form new memories for facts and events – more broadly termed their declarative LTM – plays a key role in most learning situations. This section looks at several key principles of this memory system, all of which are immediately applicable in the classroom.

Meaning

LTM preferentially encodes and stores meaningful information (Baddeley, 1966). This is why when recounting a story or joke, we remember the gist, not the exact words used when we first heard it. The clear implication of this factor in memory is that if learners do not fully understand things, they are unlikely to remember them over the long term. Meaningful processing of information is often referred to as deep processing, in contrast with the processing of more superficial details such as what information looks or sounds like (see the next section of this chapter).

Meaningful information is not stored in separate units (as might happen on a computer hard drive), but is structured into well-integrated groups and categories known as schemas. These schemas guide us by filling gaps and providing assumptions. New information is best remembered if it can be linked to an existing structure; if we have some understanding of a topic already, it is easier to learn more about it than if we are complete beginners.

Schema knowledge is not based on memory for single events, but is the representation of more general and abstract characteristics of objects and categories. For example, a learner may recall being shown a video of Mount Etna erupting, but their schema for a volcano will draw on this and many other experiences that allow them to make generalisations, such as that volcanoes are usually mountains, they can erupt but are sometimes extinct, etc.

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Research into the structure of memory and schemas suggests that our expectations can lead to information being distorted. If something that is presented is partially familiar, learners may unintentionally distort and misremember it to fit their assumptions. This was found in a classic study by researcher Frederick Bartlett, the first British professor of psychology, who read Native American folk tales to his Cambridge University students and then tested their recall. He found that they missed out the more confusing parts, added bits that were not in the originals, and overall distorted the stories to make them more like stories from their own culture. What this suggests for the more everyday teaching context is that learners who lack fundamental knowledge will not be able to take in new, more advanced knowledge – and when they do take in ideas, their understandings may be flawed and inaccurate.

The concept of schemas links well to the dominant idea in education of how knowledge is formed – social constructivism. This states that rather than being an individual process of learning an objective set of facts, knowledge is based on developing understandings partly through interaction within a social and linguistic context (Vygotsky, 1978; see also Chapter 8).

The importance of meaning implies that activities which prompt learners to think about and process meaningful information should be encouraged. This could include tasks where learners categorise information, draw hierarchies, make links and distinctions, explain concepts to others, or spot errors, for example.

Teachers often like to deliver material in discrete chunks so as not to overload learners, but it is important that links to other information are made salient too, in order to activate and develop schema knowledge. The meaningful foundations for learning must be in place; individual isolated facts are easily forgotten, while knowledge that is integrated within a well-understood structure will be retained.

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Learners can be encouraged to draw diagrams that show how areas of topic material link together, while tasks that involve drawing on several areas of learning in a real-world context can help them to develop a more interconnected structure of understanding.

Engagement and attention

Being engaged and making a mental effort plays a curious role in memory. While it may seem obvious that learners who are making more of an effort will remember better, a classic research study by Hyde and Jenkins (1973) suggested that meaningful processing plays a larger role. In their study, some learners were asked to try their best to learn a list of words for a later test, while another group were not told about the test, but were asked to state how much they liked the items on the list. It was the latter group who remembered the words better.

Nevertheless, on a more basic level, learners must at least devote attention to the task at hand (with some exceptions; see Chapter 2) in order to process new meaningful concepts at all, and too much new information presented at once – such as long lists of words or a large number of PowerPoint slides – is likely to lead to information overload and a failure to encode much of the information to memory.

Boosting the attention level of pupils is not always easy, and depends on an interaction between the learner and the material; people pay more attention if they are interested. It certainly helps to make thing...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Psychology in the Classroom
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Memory and Understanding
• 2 Cognition
• 3 Self-Theories
• 4 Creativity
• 5 Emotions
• 6 Resilience, Buoyancy and Grit
• 7 Motivation
• 8 Independent Learning
• Index