More Steps Towards Effective Learning

'Chunking' Your Learning

My elementary-aged kids and I recently played a fun game: I dumped a collection of random small objects from all over the house on the floor and placed a blanket on top. Then, I told them I'd lift the blanket for 20 seconds and would then ask them how many items they could name afterwards. They didn't do very well. Next, I told them to find some way to categorize the items — perhaps by looking at the rooms in which the items belonged, or their purpose, or their color, shape or size. 

When I lifted the blanket for a further 20 seconds, both kids could remember an awful lot more. The moral of the story? When the pieces of information you are supposed to memorize appear to be unconnected, it becomes very hard to remember much. However, when you link the things you are working on together in some logical manner, the process is simplified. 

Everything is more palatable in bite-sized "chunks". When a learner has that knowledge, all they have to do is find a way to "chunk" the information they are working with. 

You may chunk by:

• Actually breaking lots of information into smaller chunks. You can remember phone numbers more easily if you break the number into three separate sections of numbers. Poems can be memorized verse by verse, and long lists can be broken into smaller parts.
• Looking for patterns in the material you are studying, and using the patterns you discover as pegs to remember information. While this is very effective when you're working with lists, it may also be possible to apply the same principle to entire books. 
• Association is another powerful technique. If you are trying to remember something like foreign words or brand names, you can try to associate them with a word or concept that is easy to remember, because of the way the word sounds. One elementary geography I came across made up stories about the way countries are shaped, saying one country looks like an elephant, another like a boot, and so on. These associations help the shapes stick in the child's memory.
• Sorting your learning material into categories, much in the way I described above, is a very useful learning technique that will immediately benefit you. 

Feel Good, Learn Well

Your amygdala, the brain's center for emotion processing, is somewhat like a guard dog who lets folks it knows to be friendly in (into the prefrontal cortex in this case), while keeping people who seem threatening out. The people who appear threatening may actually be perfectly fine, but the dog isn't taking any chances with that.

The amygdala, too, allows stimuli that feel friendly to go through, while keeping the threatening stuff out. If you feel judged negatively, threatened, ridiculed, humiliated or otherwise treated unfairly, your amygdala won't allow you to think with the rational part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex. That means, in short, that you will not be able to retain information well if your learning environment feels threatening. 

See Also: Dyslexic Child: How to Deal with Learning Problems

Would you be able to concentrate on learning Shakespeare's Hamlet by heart while you were being attacked by a tiger? No. It's the same with the less physical modern threats that come in the form of an attack on our self-worth. Teachers who are aware of this mechanism will work towards creating a friendly, discussion-rich learning environment free of shaming. This allows students to think creatively, learn well, and thrive.