Use It or Lose It

Those who have been following these posts will know that I have been churning over the rationale for follow-up activities as a valid part of the classroom reading programme.
 
I keep coming back to this notion of ‘Use It or Lose It’ which comes from some brain activity research I read many years ago. It went something like this - to transfer information from short term memory into long-term memory we have to do something with it ... quickly and as often as possible or it gets lost.

I worked that out as a university student – for me the purpose of taking notes during a lecture was not so much to create a record for revision but it forced me to process the content; to reorganise it or to make sense of it for myself. I could never understand the students who just went for a verbatum record of the lecture.

When I hear or read something interesting during the day I try to find someone to off-load it to – it helps me process the information; it tells me whether I have really understood it or not.

Our students need to know why we are asking them to do follow-up activities. They should understand that they are learning to use a powerful set of strategies to process information. Processing information helps us to understand it better. Processing information makes it memorable. Processing information engages higher order thinking. Higher order thinking is stimulating and empowering ... it’s FUN.

Bloom’s Taxonomy provides a marvellous framework for doing this; a progression into more complex thinking.

Coming next – a close up look at each of Bloom’s Thinking levels and how they have been used in our new non-fiction resource “Birds”

REMEMBERING – What are the facts
UNDERSTANDING – Show me you understand the information
APPLYING – Using the information in another way
ANALYSING – Identifying the features that help birds survive
EVALUATING – Making judgments
CREATING – Making improvements

Previous articles
6 Things about Follow-up Comprehension Activities
3 Ways to Use Non-Fiction Text

Feel free to make a comment 

Posted 03 Aug 2011, 04:04:06 by Hilton

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