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Helping Students Retain Course Content | Origin: ED108

This is a general discussion forum for the following learning topic:

Learning Theory and Practice --> Helping Students Retain Course Content

Post what you've learned about this topic and how you intend to apply it. Feel free to post questions and comments too.

A simple song or rhyme can be a very effective tool to recall dense or challenging information. The earliest example everyone knows is to sing the alphabet...!

I have considered providing guided notes after at the end of the program before they take their post-test and making it a prerequisite. I've found many of my students (incarcerated men) tend to check boxes and just quickly go through post-test to get the certificate of completion. I think requiring this would slow them down and raise post-test scores which technically are used to evaluate me as an instructor. One issue I see with guided notes during the session is having slow down the lecture and PowerPoint to allow time for students to fill in their notes. I concerned slowing down may frustrate faster learners.

Giving visual examples and mnemonics is a good method to employ for some of my courses.

Es supremamente interesante emprender nuevos métodos de evaluación. 

This module emphasizes the importance of helping students with both decoding and recoding processes to enhance their retention of course content. Decoding involves breaking down information into understandable parts, while recoding requires reassembling and personalizing that information for storage and future retrieval. Key strategies include using guided notes, scaffolding, mnemonic devices, and graphic organizers, which assist students in efficiently processing and internalizing new information. Additionally, scaffolding is critical for supporting learners through temporary aids until they become independent.

I will apply these techniques by incorporating more scaffolding into my lessons, especially with new or challenging material. Using guided notes and graphic organizers will help students better track and understand key concepts. Mnemonics will be a helpful tool for memorization, and I will ensure that my delivery emphasizes the importance of decoding and recoding for efficient learning. By providing a variety of learning strategies, I will help students develop stronger mental processing skills for long-term retention and application.

Comment on Thomas Teeguarden's post: As an instructor you can be creative with guided notes an mneumonic devises. This could be enjoyable for students and foster creativity in learning.

I can do a LOT better at providing them with structured outlines and even graphic organizers of content, to see how each part connects with the others. I do provide note-taking outlines for some classes, and the students like them. I have another first year class that could benefit from that as well. 

Students appreciate when the instructor creates and uses effective learning aides, like guided notes, mnemonics, and scaffolding. These all make the learning and retention easier for the pupils.

I recall very few teachers that used a variety of this methods to aid in information retention. Guided notes are great as long as the instructor at least partially uses them in quizzes or tests. Graphics such as web graphs any circular cycles were great too.

Acronyms and mnemonics can be very helpful for learning.  In addition to helping with memory and recall, it also helps make learning new material more fun.

Guided notes have always been the center piece of my lectures in class, however, I now know that guided notes alone will not bring them as far as they can with the lecture in question. Using mnemonics is something I have been trying to incorporate more into the classroom, as well as graphic organizers, and the results are a stark difference in learned materials. I need to incorporate these techniques more if I want to improve student improvement! 

Acrostic is a new word for me! I have been calling it a mnemonic.

I learned that methods such as mnemonics and scaffolding are very helpful.

Mnemonics can be helpful, but sometimes they are a barrier to students deeper learning. For example I have had issues making students see past PEMDAS in algebra. 

Good notes as fill in the blank, mnemonics, key words, are all great tools for helping students to retain and retrieve important information in the class.

By using scaffolding my students will have a little reinforcement which will allow them to start remembering with out the use of the scaffold. Using mnemonics will be a fun and helpful lesson assistant for my students as well helping them retain information.

The use of scaffolding and guided notes stood out as strong techniques to assist with student learning and retention of new information.

I use process charts or flow charts.

Scaffolding is a great tactic for the students to go to the key point in an efficient way

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