What makes a good mnemonic

Mastropieri, M. Constructing more meaningful relationships in the classroom: Mnemonic research into practice. Nagel, D. Schumaker, J. The recall enhancement routine. Scruggs, T. Classroom applications of mnemonic instruction: Acquisition, maintenance and generalization. Exceptional Children, 58, Classroom Strategies Mnemonics. Background A mnemonic is an instructional strategy designed to help students improve their memory of important information.

Benefits Mnemonics are strategies that can be modified to fit a variety of learning content. Share it in the comments below! The keyword method links a new word or concept to an easily recognized known word that sounds similar. The student creates a visual image depicting this connection, which makes the new information easier to store and retrieve as needed.

Using this strategy, the student learns rhymes that can be easily connected with new words, facts, or numbers. Acronyms are one of the most popular and widely used mnemonic strategies. Using this method, students memorize a single word in which each letter is associated with an important piece of information. This letter-association strategy is especially useful for remembering short lists of items or steps.

Acrostic letter mnemonics are similar to acronyms, except students memorize a simple silly sentence instead of a word to trigger their memory. This is another great way to help students remember several pieces of interconnected information. Examples of acrostic letter sentence mnemonics:. Mnemonic methods can also be combined—use keywords and acronyms together, for example, to form an extra-effective mnemonic super-strategy.

Say your students are trying to memorize key facts about the Civil War. You can create a map-like display and enhance it with mnemonics to help them recall the information.

Use keywords for battle names, acrostic letter sentences to help them remember events in order, and pegword rhymes to associate with important Civil War figures. Get creative and consult your learners for ideas! Start out by giving your students clear instruction on these and other mnemonic strategies.

Alternatively, you could take advantage of connections already made in your memory: associate Alexander with telephones Graham Bell or Serena with a tennis racket Williams. If learning names is not enough, you can also apply this mnemonic to art class. For mnemonic imagery to be effective, it should not only be interactive and distinctive, but also concrete.

Ask yourself, why can we remember a fan more easily than the name Diane? Because the fan is a concrete object with a solid image. Imagery works because of its vividness in our mind's eyes. Paivio and colleagues showed that concrete words like cat are more accurately recalled in various memory tasks than abstract words such as truth.

So how can we memorize concepts? One tactic is to transform the abstract into a symbol that can be visually represented. For instance, think of the Veritas shield for truth, a pair of ski poles for the number 11, or flicking on a light bulb switch for realize. Imagery can also be of great help in studying foreign languages, since visual imagery mnemonics help link the irregular and the unknown the foreign words you're trying to memorize with the familiar and easily remembered the corresponding translation.

The first step in this process is to associate a foreign word with a similar-sounding and easily visualized English keyword or phrase. The second step is make the keyword and the foreign word's translation interact in an image, thereby creating a link between the foreign word and its meaning.

For example, you can remember the Spanish word for head, cabeza, as a giant Mr. Potato Head sticking out of a taxicab filled with bees. In this study, Stanford undergraduates were presented with Russian vocabulary words and allowed three days of study. Sometimes, the situation calls for more than just creating an association between two bits of information. You may want to link multiple pieces of information together, such as memorizing a timeline of events or the sequence of an experimental method.

To link multiple items and their images together, the top competitive memorizers in the world invariably use the "method of loci," which was used by ancient orators to memorize speeches. Also known as the architectural mnemonic, this device involves first memorizing a series of familiar locations or 'loci,' such as various objects in your dorm or landmarks around campus, and then using imagery to associate items with each locus.

You can then take a mental stroll to visit each locus, seeing in your mind's eye each item in sequential order. During recall tasks, brain scans of champion memorizers not only show increased activity in areas associated with visual imagery, but also increased activity in areas linked to spatial navigation Maguire et al.

Although it may sound daunting, learning the method of loci is no arduous task. Ross and Lawrence gave a group of college students instructions on using the method of loci. First, the students took two mental walks through campus and learned 52 loci well enough to recite them forward and back. Then the researchers asked the students to study many item-long lists, with about 13 seconds given for each item. An alternative to the loci method is the "peg system.

To increase the capacity for remembered items, the peg system may be used in conjunction with the "link system," which consists of constructing a chain of mental images. The links in the chain are pairs of to-be-remember items, so the first is associated with the second in one image, the second is associated with the third in a separate image, and so on. Using the link system, you can recall an ordered list that contains more items than there are pegs, because each peg is its own list. The highly versatile link system can even aid in memorizing pictures or symbols, such as when learning Chinese characters, by linking one element to another in a chain-like fashion.

With these tips in mind, you can systematically remember all the little details you need to understand and excel in your classes. Remember, the key to these mnemonics' effectiveness is making information more meaningful by adding associations, more organized by adding patterns, and more readily available by adding cues that activate different parts of the mind.