Patterns, Not Pieces

How easy would it be to find anything if you had no racks, shelves, or drawers? How would you locate files if you had no folders? A lot would get lost. Long-term memory works in a similar fashion. Students acquire certain mental frameworks or places to store details as they learn. For example, a young child notices furry four-legged animals. He might call them all "doggy" or "horsey" Every time he sees an animal like this, or even a picture of an animal like this, the child stores more details inside that frame or folder. When the amount of information inside the folder is large enough, the child is ready to create folders within folders. He can then name and distinguish among farm animals, pets, and zoo animals. This psychological growth process has a physical analog: the brains of highly intelligent people have more synapses or connections than the brains of other people.

When twenty-seven students listen to the same teacher saying the same things, a few will remember almost everything the teacher said. Many will remember most of what the teacher taught. A few will remember almost nothing. What has happened? The children who remember almost everything have appropriate frameworks available for everything the teacher has discussed. Those who can recall almost nothing lack places to store the information and/or the words to name them.

From this point of view, education means developing and naming the appropriate frameworks in which to store the knowledge that we need. The charts, diagrams, and bolded vocabulary words in today's math and science textbooks are a great help to students who study them carefully. These frames are like ready-made templates that the student can use to create personal places to store information in a patterned, organized way.

On the other hand, presenting unorganized bits of information for which the student has no name and no internal pattern fails to educate. The student can spend large amounts of time and effort trying to memorize these crumbs of knowledge only to become confused and forget it all on the day of the test, or shortly thereafter. It's something like eating bread crumbs instead of bread when you're hungry. It takes a long time and you lose a lot.

On a practical level, this means that we have to teach in patterns, not pieces. In order to learn phonics and spelling students have to see and write many words containing the same patterns before they can develop the frames in which to store them. If too much variation is presented too soon, the student can't remember the words. There are hundreds of thousands of English words. Only people who know the patterns can remember them because only patterned information can be associated with previous learning and retrieved.

When students learn the meaning of numbers by remembering a hundreds chart they always see the numbers in relationship to one another, rather than as separate, unrelated pieces of information. Numbers always have a meaning for them. When it comes time to memorize multiplication facts, students who have number patterns in mind make the necessary connections and learn quickly. They don't need hours of tedious, frustrating practice to recall unrelated bits of information.

The successful student in social studies has a mental picture of the continents and countries. When the teacher discusses conflicts between Germany and France, this student knows where these places are and can store information about them in the proper place. The student who learns social studies easily also keeps a few main dates in mind and compares the date of each event to the dates already learned.

There is a vast difference between successful and unsuccessful students in their approach to learning new words. The successful student meets an unfamiliar word in the text, carefully sounds it out, and looks for its relationship to known words before reading on. The unsuccessful student, on the other hand, skips unknown words, leaves mental folders unnamed and loses most of the information contained in them.

It seems, then, that presenting information to students in patterned ways helps students to build the internal structures necessary to retain and retrieve knowledge. Another important aspect of teaching for long-term benefit is connecting information to the experience and personal interests of the student. More on that next week.

What do you think? What are your experiences? Do you have questions about this article? Please contact me at newskill7@msn.com. Happy teaching.

Mary Sue Laing, M.Ed.
Resource Teacher, St. Ambrose School

by Mary Sue Laing, M. Ed., New Skill, Inc. Academic Tutor