Education Shortform
Long-term Memory
In a nutshell…
What use is education if you don’t remember anything that you did?
Memory-informed strategies are becoming increasingly influential throughout education (see my short article on distributed practice, for example), and this perhaps leads to a question of whether teachers and instructors understand how memory works.
One key aspect of this professional understanding is long-term memory (sometimes abbreviated ‘LTM’). To put it simply, LTM is the mind’s permanent store of knowledge and skills.
If teachers know how LTM works, this can help to inform the decisions they take about what to do and when to do it.
Types of LTM
Most researchers recognise that there are different forms of LTM that have different properties. Episodic LTM is our mental store of life events, and this can serve to boost and enrich our knowledge-based long-term memories, too. For example, memory for a scientific concept can be boosted by remembering the experience of doing a practical experiment or some fieldwork.
Meanwhile, semantic LTM is our memory for facts and meanings, while procedural LTM is our memory for physical actions such as riding a bike or shooting a basketball.
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This is one of a series of shortform education articles. You can download a simplified summary of my ‘A–Z of Educational concepts’ here.
By the way, memory is one of my key research interests, and I know that this article only scratches the surface. I write weekly newsletters on issues of memory and metacognition, and recommend resources and articles for educators, too. It’s free! Sign up here.
