Promoting higher‐order learning benefits by building lower‐order mnemonic connections

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted in an effort to combine a mnemonic strategy for remembering individual items with a mnemonic procedure for remembering, and reasoning about, inter-item relationships. In Experiment 1, students using the combined mnemonic approach were able to identify more individual items (fish names from their pictures) and were subsequently able to remember more components of six studied hierarchies (order, family, and species names of the fish) than did students in an 'own best method' control condition. Additionally, and importantly, mnemonic students outperformed control students on an analogy task requiring inferences about superordinate, subordinate, and coordinate relationships. In Experiment 2, the initial number of to-be-learned fish was reduced so that the performance of both mnemonic and control students was comparable with respect to fish identification. Despite such item-level comparability, an advantage for mnemonically instructed students was observed on both immediate and two-day-delayed hierarchy tests. We suggest that by cementing lower-order connections, mnemonic strategies facilitate students' learning of higher-order information.

A Novel Approach in Facilitating Aviation Emergency Procedure Learning and Recall through an Intuitive Pictorial System

“…The objective findings of this study did not achieve the clear results of previous research which reported that pictorial mnemonics lead to benefits beyond simple rote memory (Carney and Levin, 2003;Cherry, Dokey, Reese, and Brigman, 2003). The limitations outlined above may have unintentionally masked or suppressed the objective measures when comparing the IPS to the traditional training method.…”

“…The power calculation was conducted specifying a desired power of .80, an a level of .05, and a large effect size (d = 1.00). The effect size of 1.00 was based on the results of a study by Carney and Levin (2003). Carney and Levin's work examined the effects of training undergraduate students in the use of mnemonic strategies (pictorial representations) on their memory and recall of unfamiliar hierarchical information, which was sufficiently similar to the objectives of this study.…”

“…These variations, he notes, in the effectiveness of these self-constructed strategies undoubtedly contribute to the wide individual differences in their development. In several experiments, Levin and his associates (Carney and Levin, 2003;Hwang and Levin, 2002;Carney and Levin, 2002) have demonstrated the utility of employing pictorially-based mnemonic strategies. In each experiment, results have indicated the statistically significant superior performance of those employing a taught strategy over that of an untrained control group.…”

“…Regardless of the theoretical mechanisms, the purpose of any learning is to transfer new information from working or short-term memory (a temporary store) to long-term memory, memory that has no capacity limits and holds information from minutes to an entire lifetime (Reed, 2004). Previous research and experience has demonstrated that providing students with instructions on the use of memorization techniques (mnemonic strategies) has resulted in improvements in their ability to recall learned information (Carney and Levin, 2003;Kleinheksel and Summy, 2003;Hwang and Levin, 2002;Carney and Levin, 2002;Cox, 2001). Mnemonic strategies are systematic procedures for enhancing memory (Mastropieri and Scruggs, 1998) and are used to facilitate the acquisition of factual information because they assist in the memory encoding process, either by providing familiar connections or by creating new connections between to-be-remembered information and the learner's prior knowledge (Levin and Levin, 1990).…”

The Effect of Translating Specialized Vocabulary into Plain English in the courses of Food Fermentation and Brewing

“…Vocabulary Anglicization which seek to relate unfamiliar new words to familiar known words share some similarity with the mnemonic instruction which has been shown to greatly increase student retention of information compared to students who studied new terms using self-determined methods [4]. Mnemonic instructions are also shown to improve the ability of students to apply the basic knowledge to answer higher-order questions [5], resulting in an improved ability to transfer knowledge to new contexts [6,7]. It is noticed that some students have the perception of sciences as an inherently exclusive field.…”