Five Strategies for Remembering Everything You Learn

In my forty years of working with gifted students (my own children, and my students), I have always been utterly amazed at their capacity to remember practically everything that they’ve seen, heard, or learned experientially.  Whether it’s that promise to allow her to shave her legs when she turns thirteen (a promise made during her toddlerhood), to a recitation of all of the names of dinosaurs with detailed facts when he’s three, to an “I-never-study-I just-listen-in-class” confession when he’s in high school, gifted kids delight and amuse us, and REMEMBER EVERYTHING with seemingly little effort. That is, until they inevitably hit a wall.  And because they are gifted kids, and often have not learned the coping skills and/or study habits necessary to help them learn effectively, they fail, and this failure can set up a cycle of underachievement that is hard to break.

It is with this backdrop in gifted education that I read the article Five Strategies for Remembering Everything You Learn from the Business Insider.

The article begins by asserting that there are two kinds of learning -- essentially the content and the process.  Schools (and parents) do a respectable job with the content, but do not always address the process.  It explains that, "We're comfortable talking about concrete information: names, dates, numbers, facts. But the guidance we offer on the act of learning itself — the 'metacognitive' aspects of learning — is more hit-or-miss, and it shows." Though the article postulates that this is a cultural issue, and an issue that often affects struggling learners, I believe that it can also affect gifted learners, because I have seen it happen so frequently. They eventually reach a point where their strategies (or lack of strategies) fail them.

The article then goes on to offer five suggestions to enhance the metacognitive aspects of  learning. (These were taken from an update of an article originally posted by Drake Baer on Tech Insider).

• Force yourself to recall -- early and often -- and space out your attempts at recalling the information, instead of cramming them all into the span of a few minutes or hours. Some forgetting will inevitably happen during study sessions, which will force you to engage the thinking processes more rigorously. Think back to your high school and college days...did you practice this strategy or did you cram? (As a point of reference, only 11% of college students currently report using the “early and often recall” strategy).
  
• Don’t go easy on yourself when studying. Instead, practice a strategy called interleaving, which requires you to do different kinds of problems drawn from a variety of lessons over time. This may seem inefficient at first, but will require an analysis of the kind of problem, a synthesis of the needed strategy, and an evaluation of the success of the problem solving method used. This mimics real-life remembering and problem solving.
  
• Don’t fall for fluency. If something seems easy, or seems to come to you easily, make it more difficult to remember, and check yourself.  Associate the learning with something to reinforce the connection.
  
• Connect new learning to old learning. You’re building brain connections, which strengthen the learning.
  
• Finally, set aside time to reflect on your learning. Reflection is one of the tried and true ways to analyze what worked, and what didn’t work during your learning quest.
  

Here’s my challenge to you. If you are dealing with a student who needs to enhance his/her toolkit for learning to learn, try utilizing these strategies. And...as you age, re-employ these strategies to keep your brain active and efficient. I know I am benefitting from these techniques!

As always, I hope that this foray into other ideas, and then linking them to the gifted perspective, has made you think. I welcome hearing from you!
Jacquelyn Drummer
Past President, WATG

​