Reflective Writing #11

PIDP 3250 – Assignment 1: Reflection 2

Objective

For this assignment, I’ve chosen to reflect on the power of association in information retention and recollection. In describing association, Barkley’s Student Engagement Techniques (2010) states “Learning two items together so that the two are bonded or associated also affects transfer, and when one of the items is recalled, the other is spontaneously recalled as well” (p. 21). I find the idea of association a useful recall strategy to help students remember information they might not otherwise retain.

Reflective

I chose this idea of association because, as soon as I read the description, I thought of a silly analogy a colleague of mine uses to describe SCRs. SCRs act as electrical one way valves (just like a diode), but they have a unique property in which even when the current is biased to flow the correct way through the one way valve, nothing happens until you send a pulse of current to the ‘gate’, thus opening the gate and allowing the current to flow. The analogy goes: SCRs are like cows. He paints a mental scene of cows milling around in a pen ready to escape, followed by a short story that encompasses all important information related to SCRs. By associating abstract theory to a visual of a farm, I don’t need to think of random information such as V_DRM, I_GT, I_H; I need to think of cows.

Interpretive

Perhaps the biggest insight I gained from this assignment is summed up by Barkley: “the more we learn and retain, the more we can learn and retain” (p. 21). This is because the human brain retains new information by making associations. Barkley describes this as finding “hooks” to place the information on. If you have many hooks (lots of knowledge), you have many places to associate new knowledge! This explains student achievement I have observed in my classroom. The older students, or ones who have a lot of life experience, tend to excel. This is in the face of adversity such as being single parents, holding down jobs, and being out of formal education for 20+ years. One would think those straight out of high school with no responsibility would have a definite competitive edge, however this is not the case. Mentally older students tend to ‘get it’ and understand concepts better than younger people. I suspect this may be due to the above effect.

Decisional

This idea of association being used to aid in memory recollection can be applied to my class. The Memory Page’s article How to improve your memory with associations (n.d) suggests using visualizations and acronyms to help recall information. By presenting the information with a helpful memory trick, we as instructors can teach not only the course content, but valuable study techniques.

References

Barkley, E. F. (2010). Student Engagement Techniques. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.

The Memory Page (n.d). How to improve your memory with associations. Retrieved from

How to improve your memory with associations