Thinking About How Learners Retain Information

What ideas do you have for aiding your learners’ memory retention of important knowledge and skills (reference class activities and readings as warranted)? What role might form play in your ideas?

Based on Ambrose’s Model of Motivation and Julie Dirksen’s chapter on memory — as a group — we came together with some key insights.

(1) Give your learners multiple shelves. Our human cognition process is messy and we think we know more than we actually do know. We need to provide learners with tools that they can use to retrieve learned information later on.

(2) Avoid habituation. Learners become numb to monotonous stimuli, our learning experience should not fall into a repetitive drone but rather excite and energize the learner.

(3) Utilise the chunking technique. Our ability to retain knowledge in one sitting has its limits. As to prevent overwhelming the learner, we can utilize chunking in order to dissect and make information more manageable.

(4) Create positive emotional contexts. By being more mindful of the emotions we conjure in our learners, we can turn dull learning experiences into colorful and memorable ones.

(5) Allow learners to practice in the same way that they will need to perform. Knowledge can only last so long in working memory without practice, so giving learners a space to apply their learning is critical to moving knowledge into long-term memory.

Concept Development

By now, we’ve honed in on the core concept that we aim to teach our audience.

Our aim: Remove binary views of success and failure to help facilitate a mindset for lifelong learning.

We then asked ourselves a series of “how might we?” questions. How might we attract our learner’s attention? What structures might help our learners encode and later retrieve information? How might we cultivate a growth mindset over a fixed mindset? These questions helped us bucket our ideas into three main categories — engage, apply, and motivate.

These valuable ideas helped us further develop some existing ideas, and generate new ones. Here are some (messy) sketches.

A card game that nudges the learner to problem solve in order to earn badges. These badges serve as a way to honor the failures that push our learners to continuously strive for the stars. This idea takes on a “choose your own adventure” approach where the learner is asked to make key decisions that shape the gameplay. We’re letting the learner take control over the consequences of their actions — and by extension, their learning.

A pocket mobile game that gives learners an outlet to track their failures. Each failure is metaphorized as a plant that takes time to nurture and grow. Eventually, the learner is able to see her little garden and (literally) see her growth via entries in their digital garden. In this method, we’re providing learners with an organized way of looking back on their past failures. We’re organizing the long-term memory so that the lessons from the failures are easier to retrieve.

Another stab at an old idea — Recipes for Disaster. A journalling experience where learners are guided on a journey that takes them on an introspective look at their past failures. The learner ends up with a “recipe for disaster” that they live on as an artifact to be passed down or kept tucked away for later use. This idea also helps organize long-term memory and declutter the brain. We’re providing learners with a tangible way to look back upon lessons learned from past failures.

Another take on an old idea — Recipes for Disaster. In this instance, learners are each given a journal that they are to fill with failures. The journal is separated into three sections, and with each section, the questions become harder to answer, requiring more vulnerability. In the end, learners swap their journals and turn their partner’s failures into successes. This idea scaffolds the learning experience by slowly peeling back the layers as opposed to hitting learners with the hard questions from the get-go. This idea also takes on a storytelling approach where people are urged to share stories with one another. We’re hoping that this technique may leverage existing mental frameworks to disguise the learning experience as a meaningful conversation.

Next Steps

• Create a balance between storytelling and learning. Connecting back to the real world with facts.
• Being aware of ideal decisions in games vs. a decision you would make in real life. How might we peel back the layers and urge the learner to open up? Should our idea simulate the real world, or should we use a metaphor to get our points across?
• Being aware of urgency/high stakes in-game decisions. Do we want to lower or higher the stakes — which leads to a more productive learning experience, and which helps to create a safe space for learning about failure?

We’re still asking a lot of questions but they’re important ones — ones that will help us gain a better understanding of how to engage & motivate our learners and how to eventually provide our learners with a platform to apply the knowledge to future endeavors.