Helping students remember…
…through meaningful organisation.
Hello all. Welcome to the 189th edition of TEPS Weekly!
Ms. Kavitha is teaching the Grade 10 History chapter Print Culture and the Modern World. Towards the end of the lesson, she writes a question on the board: How did print change life in India?
The answer includes several points: cheaper books reach more readers, women read and write about their lives, reformers question social practices, religious groups circulate their views, workers gain access to reading material, newspapers criticise colonial rule. Ms. Kavitha writes each point as a full sentence on the board, and students copy them into their notebooks. When the board fills up, she asks, “Has everyone finished copying?” She then erases the first few points to make space for the remaining ones. By the end, students have the complete answer in their notebooks.
“This is an important answer,” she says. “Read it three times and learn all the points for tomorrow.”
The next morning, Ms. Kavitha asks students to close their notebooks and answer the same question. One student remembers the first two points, then stops. Another remembers something about newspapers but cannot explain it. A third begins confidently, misses a sentence and starts again from the beginning.
Ms. Kavitha gives them five more minutes to revise. But when she asks again, several students still struggle. They have read the answer repeatedly. Yet, without the notebook, they cannot bring the ideas together.
That evening, Ms. Kavitha reads about psychologist George Mandler’s work on organisation and memory. It makes her reconsider how she provided the points of the answer to students. The points belong to the same topic, but has she helped students understand how they fit together?
Same topic, meaningful organisation
The next day, Ms. Kavitha returns to the question. “Yesterday, we tried to remember each point separately. Today, let us start by looking at the kinds of changes these points describe.”
She divides the blackboard into three sections.
Under Explanations and examples, she writes two short points: ‘Books become cheaper’ and ‘More people get access to books’.
She asks, “How would cheaper books change who can buy or borrow them? Would books reach only a few people, or more people?”
A student responds, “More people.”
Ms. Kavitha follows up, “So, what common idea do these points convey about the impact of print?”
A student suggests, “More people were able to read.”
Ms. Kavitha writes ‘More readers’ in the left section, under Main ideas, and asks students to identify other points in their answers that belong to this group.
Next, she writes ‘Women write about their lives’ and ‘Reformers question social practices’ in the middle section.
“What are people using print to do here?” she asks.
Students suggest that people can share their experiences and question how they are treated.
Ms. Kavitha writes ‘Social questions’ under Main ideas.
She follows the same process with the remaining points until the class has four main ideas: ‘More readers’, ‘Social questions’, ‘Religious debates’ and ‘Political expression’. Throughout the discussion, she erases and adds points to the Explanations and examples column based on student responses.
Ms. Kavitha points to each main idea and asks students to explain the points within it. Under ‘Religious debates’, for example, she asks, “How does printing help people share their religious views?” As students respond, she writes short phrases in the middle section and connects them with arrows: ‘Religious texts and arguments are printed → more people encounter these views → people discuss and debate them’.
She then points to the four main ideas on the left and asks, “Which main idea have we just explained? Which one comes next?” She erases the middle section when she needs space, but keeps the ‘Main ideas’ section visible throughout.
Towards the end, Ms. Kavitha erases the middle section completely and asks students to close their notebooks. “Use the four groups to explain the changes to your partner. Give one point or example under each.”
Finally, she invites students to share their points. She notes key points in the right section, under ‘What we remember’. Students check their own answers and add what they miss.
Several students now recall points from across the topic, although some still need prompts and further practice.
How much difference can organisation make?
In experiments published in 1969, Gordon Bower and his colleagues presented participants with words either arranged in meaningful hierarchies or presented randomly. Recall was two to three times better with the organised presentation. These were word-list experiments, so we cannot expect the same increase in every classroom. However, the findings show how much the organisation of information can influence remembering.
This connects to psychologist George Mandler’s organisation theory of memory. His work highlights that memory involves actively organising information into meaningful groups and using those groups to recall their contents.
Let us return to Ms. Kavitha’s two lessons. In the first, students repeatedly read a sequence of points. Some remember the beginning but lose their place midway. In the second, they actively organise information into meaningful groups and can use those groups to recall their contents. (Cheaper books and wider access become part of ‘More readers’.) The difference is not simply that the answer has subheadings – but that students have actively thought about what holds each group together.
Meaningful organisation, working memory and long-term memory
Working memory is where we hold and think about information at that moment. Its capacity is limited to 5-7 pieces of information. When we present students with many unfamiliar pieces of information together, they must try to hold them in mind while also understanding how they relate. When there is too much information, like what happened in Ms. Kavitha’s first lesson, working memory gets overloaded, and students are unable to process information.
In Ms. Kavitha’s second lesson, related details were meaningfully organised to form manageable groups. This is called chunking. Instead of treating ‘cheaper books’ and ‘wider access’ as two unrelated facts, students can think about them as connected points within the group ‘More readers’. Working memory is also able to handle 5-7 meaningfully organised chunks of information at a time and pass them into long-term memory.
However, a heading alone does not create a chunk. If students copy ‘More readers’ without understanding why the points belong there, they may simply have one more phrase to keep in mind. Ms. Kavitha’s questions help them build the chunk.
Her boardwork provides further support. The four main groups remain visible while she explains one part in the middle section. Students can look back to see where the explanation belongs. They do not have to keep the whole structure in their working memory throughout the discussion.
Long-term memory is the web of information where memories are stored. Meaningful organisation helps students connect new details to the ideas and knowledge already present in their web of information. In Ms. Kavitha’s lesson, students connect the new details to something they already know: when something costs less, more people can afford it. This helps them understand how ‘cheaper books’ leads to ‘wider access’. They organise these connected details under the new main idea ‘More readers’, building meaningful organisation within their web of information.
When Ms. Kavitha asks, “How did print change life in India?”, the question acts as a cue – a prompt that helps students retrieve related information from long-term memory. Students may first retrieve ‘More readers’. Its connections within their web of information then help them retrieve ‘cheaper books’ and ‘wider access’ and explain the relationship between them. Meaningful organisation therefore helps students remember better because retrieving one idea helps them retrieve the connected details.
Planning for meaningful organisation
When a lesson contains a lot of information, plan how students will organise it into meaningful groups and use those groups to retrieve the information later. Use this checklist while planning:
Form meaningful groups: Which points belong together, and why? Meaningful groups help students understand how the points connect.
Name each meaningful group: What name clearly describes the points within each meaningful group? The name can later act as a cue to retrieve those points.
OR
Plan how students will name each meaningful group: Decide suitable names while planning, then prepare guiding questions that help students suggest names themselves. This encourages them to think about what connects the points within each meaningful group.
Connect to existing knowledge: What do students already know that helps them understand the points within each meaningful group? This helps them connect new information to their web of information.
Teach one meaningful group at a time: In what order will you explain the meaningful groups, and where will students need examples or a pause? This gives working memory time to process the information.
Keep meaningful groups visible: Where will you write the names of the meaningful groups while explaining their points? Keeping them visible helps students follow where each explanation belongs.
Check the meaningful organisation: What will you ask students to explain about why points belong within a meaningful group? Their responses show whether they understand the meaningful organisation.
Plan retrieval with a cue: What question will help students retrieve the meaningful groups and then the points within them, without looking at their notes? This checks whether the meaningful organisation supports retrieval.
How can graphic organisers, such as Venn diagrams and tree diagrams, help students see and understand the meaningful organisation of information? Reply to this newsletter and share how you use them in your lessons – we would love to learn from your examples!
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Edition: 5.44
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