I Can’t Remember

In the early days of personal computers, many users came in contact with the concept of computer memory. The main category consumers encountered was RAM. RAM (Random Access Memory) is volatile temporary storage which erases if the power goes out or the program crashes. We were admonished to save our work frequently to a more durable form on a floppy disk or later on our hard drive to avoid emotional meltdown due to the loss of something important to us, like a term paper!

Students not infrequently feel they’ve been given brains with a very small amount of RAM and a power supply that is flaky. The power surges cause the screen to blink, the brain to reboot, and what was in RAM to disappear. Alternatively, a study session seems to be packing their RAM with facts, but many of the facts vaporize just as they are taking a test demanding recall.

“School is frustrating because our memory is so fragile.” That’s the pragmatist speaking. No, our school memory is flaky because we aren’t using our brains correctly. You probably have a stellar memory for some things that you remember with little effort. One of my granddaughters and her father have a phenomenal memory for the players and coaches in college football this year and they haven’t had to drill themselves to maintain those memories.

We all remember a vast array of ideas and facts IF they are important to us. That’s the main reason school memory is so flaky. We’re usually not sure why the facts in the curriculum are important long-term, but we have to “learn” them anyway.

What follows is an approximate transcript of Episode 3 this season, “I Can’t Remember.”

Intro:

This season I’m aiming to provide practical help so that you can transcend the constraints of your child’s school environment and help them recover their curiosity and joy in learning.

In the last episode we talked about the stultifying effects of a fact orientation on our motivation to learn. It is equally true that fact orientation shows its ultimate futility in our failure to remember facts long-term. School often seems to be a series of episodes of binging on facts in preparation for testing followed by deleting them after the test to make way for the next batch of facts.

Learning is more than remembering, but it is not less.

Learning that is not durable is a counterfeit. Today’s educational systems reward students who are good fact memorizers. Some systems even glorify memorization as though it is a necessary step that stocks the mind in preparation for critical thinking years later. That’s not how durable memory is produced.

Today we’ll be thinking through cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham’s learning principle number 3: “Memory is the residue of thought.”

Podcast:

Cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham’s practical book, Why Don’t Students Like School? addresses a real need. Many parents find their children disenchanted with and even cynical about the value of school as a place of learning. Socialization, yes. Learning that answers important questions leading to increasing understanding of how the world works? —seldom.

Assessment is where the rubber meets the road in education. School districts, individual teachers, and, of course, students succeed or fail as measured by testing data. Standardized tests are based on fact recall because that makes them objective and unarguable. A fact is a true statement after all. Teachers likewise structure their own tests around fact retrieval because that’s the easiest test to make and to grade. Scoring in the educational game is based on memorization.

That was certainly my story in high school and in my early undergraduate years. I was a good memorizer, and I was rewarded with good grades. It was only as I contemplated graduate school that I assessed myself and realized that I did not really understand most of what I had memorized. That was a frightening realization. Someone somewhere was going to call my bluff. They were going to expect me to apply what I had supposedly learned, and my main skill was retrieving facts. Not only that, I found my brain increasingly leaky as though I had reached the maximum number of TB of storage and old facts were being suspiciously deleted.

Because memory has become the sine qua non of educational systems, students and teachers alike make recall the primary goal. Rather than using the brain as it was designed to operate, they take a shortcut and head straight for memorization strategies. This shortcut also short-circuits real learning.

All of us have been faced with pages of notes we needed to load into our brains before a test. For many of us this was part of a cram session that was bumping up dangerously close to the test itself. Fueled by caffeine and adrenaline we found lists of related facts that would surely need to be reproduced on the test. The way to force this into memory was to create a mnemonic device. The OED defines a mnemonic as “a pattern of letters, ideas, or associations which assists in remembering something.” A mnemonic device is the quintessential brain hack.

Image by Van3ssa 🩺🎵 Desiré 🙏 Dazzy 🎹 from Pixabay

For instance, "Every Good Boy Does Fine" is a mnemonic device used to remember the notes on the lines of the treble clef in music. Since I’m a baritone, the bass clef is more relevant to me and there the mnemonic is “Good Boys Do Fine Always.” The similarity of this to the treble clef mnemonic (Good, Boy, Fine) compromises its utility for me. Nor infrequently I think the mnemonic is more trouble than it’s worth.

It is telling that in a mnemonic we impose a pattern because what we are trying to retrieve doesn’t have a pattern. As I’ve said before, brains are for pattern recognition and pattern creation; they are not fact databases. A mnemonic device is a forced pattern that we create. This is probably acceptable for something arbitrary like the names of notes, but many students employ mnemonic devices as a regular study strategy. In doing so they fail to uncover the real patterns that intellectual wrestling could reveal to them. More on this in a few minutes.

To understand memory better, we need to make a tentative grossly oversimplified schematic of the brain. The center of our conscious thought is often called working memory. This is the center of our awareness. It is in a constant state of flux. Items don’t stay there very long. Some cognitive psychologists call this the short-term memory, while others think short-term memory is a kind of buffer that feeds into working memory.

From Willingham, *Why Don’t Students Like School? (*p. 59)

All of the senses report to short-term or perhaps directly to working memory. They report there, but most sensory information is disregarded. This is intentional. The senses can easily overload the brain. To avoid that and to leave bandwidth for thinking, the brain monitors sensory input looking for change sufficient to alert the conscious brain. This is why we have to fight to stay focused on someone who is droning on and why we often lose the battle.

Image by reallywellmadedesks from Pixabay

Visualize working memory as a small desk. New information comes in through the senses. In addition, we retrieve stored ideas from long-term memory. These ideas are chosen because they may give meaning to what just came in via the senses. The interaction between the new and the older items may modify an older idea. We may decide the new input is part of the older idea. We may decide the retrieved idea is not relevant to the new sensory information and replace it with a different idea from long-term memory. I say ideas (and not information) are retrieved from long-term memory for reasons I’ll develop later in this podcast.

There are three key elements in this model.

The purpose of the desk is to work out concepts and their connections. That’s what thinking is all about. Working memory is where all learning originates. It is the place where sensory inputs that convey novel information are brought together with ideas retrieved from long-term memory.
The second element is that the desk is small. There is very little bandwidth to work in. The capacity seems to range somewhere between 3 and 9 items depending on the complexity of the items on the desk. If you exceed capacity, thinking stops and frustration replaces it. This small capacity can easily be demonstrated when you are asked to enter your credit card number for an online purchase. Many cards have broken down a long number into groups of three or four because of the limits of working memory.
The third element is that we keep clearing off the small desk. Working memory is extremely volatile with items disappearing within less than 20 seconds unless consciously rehearsed. Think of the last time you had to remember a phone number long enough to get it into your phone. If there was any significant delay in execution, you probably had to ask for the number again. There is a time window as well as an item limit.

Amazingly this seeming bottleneck doesn’t limit our capacity for thinking. Rather, it forces us to prioritize the creation of ideas over the collecting of information. The pain in your brain when you try to cram facts in should signal that you are not using your brain properly just as physical pain from tennis elbow shows you aren’t using your racket properly.

Long-term memory is effectively unlimited in capacity. Working memory limitations are the gatekeeper for storage. Quality control is also exercised over what makes it past the gatekeeper. Raw information and facts are going to have a hard time masquerading as ideas. These as well as half-baked, illogical, or trivial ideas are also regularly discarded from long-term memory through a process called consolidation.

Two cognitive scientists, Richards and Frankland, argue that transience (forgetting) is an intentional design feature of the brain and not a bug.

Blake A. Richards and Paul W. Frankland, “The Persistence and Transience of Memory” (Neuron 94, June 21, 2017, pp. 1071-1084).

“It is only through the interaction of persistence and transience …that memory actually serves its true purpose: using the past to intelligently guide decision-making.”

That sounds like wisdom is the principal thing, but wisdom also knows a thing or two!

I’ve long maintained that learning is conceptual change. Because of our encounters with reality, throughout life we revise our concepts and their place within our conceptual frameworks. We purposefully overwrite misconceptions, and we create new concepts. The ability to learn presupposes cognitive flexibility, which, in turn, requires purposeful targeted forgetting.

What this means is that you should never attempt to memorize what you could remember because you understand it.

Rote memorization is a short-circuit, not a shortcut.

Always push for understanding. Memory is not the goal. Memory is a byproduct of understanding.

Willingham himself says

“The teacher’s goal should almost always be to get students to think about meaning.” (p.66)

He gives up too soon in this example:

“Memorizing meaningless material is commonly called rote memorization. . . . Let’s just acknowledge that a student who has memorized the first nine elements of the periodic table has little or no idea why she has done so or what the ordering might mean.” (p. 81)

My chemist colleagues would be apoplectic. There is indeed a logic to the periodic table! There’s a repeating pattern, that’s why it’s called periodic! The names of the first nine elements might not readily map to a logic, but the properties of the elements are certainly patterned and predictable!

Willingham repeats a long-standing error when he says,

“There are times when a teacher may deem it important for a student to have such knowledge ready in long-term memory as a stepping-stone to understanding something deeper. How can a teacher help a student get that material into long-term memory?” (p. 81)

Willingham’s answer is to use mnemonics. As we’ve seen, the brain’s cognitive systems plot against such subterfuge. A few pages later Willingham mitigates some of the damage,

“When is it appropriate to ask students to memorize something before it has much meaning? Probably not often . . .” (p. 89)

Willingham right points out, “You remember what you think about.” (p. 86) This leads directly to his principle for the chapter, “Memory is the residue of thought.” (p. 58)

Memory is what’s left over from a process of thinking.

Thinking is done in working memory as we’ve seen. Thinking seeks to take new information inputs from the senses and integrate them with existing concepts or create new concepts. Additionally, thinking tries to connect concepts with new logical links, preferably those that leverage cause and effect.

If there is a secret path to learning it is through stories.

Many have observed that we seem to be naturally wired to learn through narrative. I am sure this is at least part of the reason the
Bible has an overarching connected narrative and is not 66 disconnected books.

This doesn’t mean that you or your child’s teacher need to always be in storyteller mode. Rather, learning that will propel your child through the ups and downs of thinking will likely be characterized by at least the first three of the 4 C’s of the story framework. (p. 72)

Here are the 4 C’s:

Causality
Conflict
Complications
Character

Stories have a compelling question that is central to the plot. Parents should assume such a question has not been articulated by the professional educators because they are typically focused on “content” or “material” which is factual and only obliquely serves to answer an unstated question. This type of instruction has charitably been profiled as answering a question that no one is asking.

It is up to you to get your head around the facts and come up with a good question. This is like playing Jeopardy!

Jeopardy.com
I was told years ago that Ken Jennings (shown here) reminds them of me. I don’t see it!

So: This author wrote a dystopic novel which was also referenced in a famous Apple commercial.

Question that answers this: “Who is George Orwell?”

In George Orwell’s 1984, the central question is something like, “What is life when individuality and truth are suppressed by central authoritarian control?” This question references the central conflict of the story. As Winston Smith rebels against the totalitarian control of Big Brother, it causes a succession of harrowing events. Complications pile up as a result of each of Winston’s acts of rebellion. Through the arc of the story, we learn about Winston’s character.

Each unit of instruction should be structured around a compelling question that embeds the student in thinking about the question and not just feeding them information. After all memory is the residue of thought and the desired memories are the result of having to think about specific challenges built-into the story.

Willingham explains:

“Because comprehending stories requires lots of medium-difficulty inferences, you must think about the story’s meaning throughout. . . . Your memory for stories is also aided by their causal structure. If you remember one part of the plot, it’s a good guess that the next thing that happened was caused by what you remember.” (Pp. 73-74) {emphasis added]

Willingham is referring to the compelling question when he says, “it’s all about the central conflict of the story.” (p. 79). Answering this question about the story means (as the Brits would say) you are sussing out the cause, conflict, and complications the story lays out. A good deal of this is by inference making which requires significant engagement with the story. Notice that you’re expecting the student to make the inferences and not just supplying them yourself. Thinking deeply about these things leaves a lasting trace in the brain, a memory. Memory is the natural byproduct of thinking that searches for causality. If you build it in your brain, your brain remembers how it got there.

As Ben Franklin is supposed to have observed: “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” I would add that “involve me” is a call for the student to be involved in thinking and to learn is implicitly to remember.

Outro:

I hope you’re finding actionable coaching strategies for your child in these podcasts. Just as a coach doesn’t get on the field or the court and actually play the game, you’re trying to equip a player, your son or daughter, to grow to love learning and to find satisfaction in pursuing understanding.

I’d love to hear from you about the personal benefits of these podcasts as well as continuing challenges. You can contact me at my website deepanddurable.com

In this episode as we talked about the design and operation of memory, we had to contrast ideas with facts. On the next podcast we’ll address how to help catalyze the formulation of ideas in your child.

Willingham’s principle number four is: “We understand new things in the context of things we already know, and most of what we know is concrete.”

Join me in two weeks as we operationalize the construction of conceptual frameworks!