During exam season, attention is focused on how to register facts, ideas or techniques in students’ memories, and how to get them to recall the ideas or techniques from this mysterious store. In preparation for last summer’s exams I tried an approach using Post-it notes. As we work through past papers, when facts or techniques are […]
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Sometimes we use simplistic recall and knowledge questions, for example: Is 29 a multiple of 3? What is ¾ of 48? What is the probability of rolling a 6 on a fair dice? What shape is this ? We tend to use them because we want to move the lesson on at a pace that […]
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Memory in the internet age Having worked with David Thomas, former US Memory Champion , memory is something which excites me and I firmly believe it plays an enormous part in the successful preparation of students for examinations. His tremendous passion for memory enabled him to recite Pi to 22,500 digits and he later gained 4th place in the World Memory […]
Read more Geographical issues are wide-ranging, important, complex, and they present themselves on a range of scales. As teachers, we happily spend weeks developing students’ knowledge and understanding of case studies that represent these issues. I want to question how this material is being assessed and why examination boards assess specific aspects of geographical issues. I am […]
Read morePsychologists have known for many years that memories are primarily stored in the cerebral cortex of the brain, and that a ‘control centre’ buried deep in the brain, is involved in both creating memories and retrieving them from their store in the cerebral cortex: made up of the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex. In November […]
Read moreMany thanks to vick_the_chick for a comment about our diagram of the multi-store model on p. 24 of the AS Complete Companion. Cara and Mike have clarified the status of rehearsal. You can see their changes in these two pdfs: one for page 24 and one for page 26. MSM clarification p24 MSM clarification p26
Read moreThis week there was a programme on TV about The Boy who can’t forget (see here ), about people who remember everything. They’re not the only ones with special recall. There are also people who don’t forget faces, they recognise anyone they have ever met (see Caroline Williams ‘Face savers’, New Scientist, September 15). It has been […]
Read moreThe A2 book for the Welsh board is just about finished – but not in time for the new term. In fact it won’t finally appear in a beautifully bound version until after Christmas. But do not despair – OUP (our new publishers) are going to make three chapters available for free. The chapters will […]
Read moreThe excellent BBC radio series about case studies in psychology is returning this week and is about Henry Molaison (HM) – on Wednesday 11 August at 11 am. You can find details here . The blurb in the Radio Times says ‘In 1953, after a brain operation to cure his epilepsy, Henry Molaison was left unable […]
Read moreUniversity students in north-east England have been taking part in a study to see the effects of binge drinking on memory. So what counted as binge drinking? Imbibing 6 units of alcohol in a drinking session twice a week or more was the criterion, and those students with other habits such as smoking and drug taking […]
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