1. Activate student memory centers.
PRIMARY-RECENCY EFFECT
A practical method that may be helpful for the classroom teacher to adopt when teaching the adolescent brain is to structure the class period according to the primacy-recency effect or serial position effect. Sousa (2006) described the importance of the primary-recency effect in the classroom. In a class period of 40 minutes, the first 20 minutes are “prime-time-one” and these instructional minutes should be used to present primary and correct information because the student will remember this first. The next ten minutes are “down time” and should be used for practice of the new material taught. The last 20 minutes are “prime-time-two” and is when the student makes sense out of the lesson (Sousa, 2006).
It may be wise to use prime-time-one to focus on communicating the lesson objective and teach new information immediately. Attendance and other items may be tended to during the ten minutes assigned for student practice. Prime-time-two may be used for reflection, review and a final discussion of the new learning acquired. This method is simple to incorporate, time-effective, and may help students to focus, learn, and retain information.
Photography Credit: White Matter Fibers, HCP Dataset Full side-view. White matter fiber architecture of the brain. Measured from diffusion spectral imaging (DSI). The fibers are color-coded by direction: red = left-right, green = anterior-posterior, blue = up-down. Courtesy of the Laboratory of Nuero Imaging and Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Consortium of of the Human Connectome Project www.humanconnectomeproject.org
A practical method that may be helpful for the classroom teacher to adopt when teaching the adolescent brain is to structure the class period according to the primacy-recency effect or serial position effect. Sousa (2006) described the importance of the primary-recency effect in the classroom. In a class period of 40 minutes, the first 20 minutes are “prime-time-one” and these instructional minutes should be used to present primary and correct information because the student will remember this first. The next ten minutes are “down time” and should be used for practice of the new material taught. The last 20 minutes are “prime-time-two” and is when the student makes sense out of the lesson (Sousa, 2006).
It may be wise to use prime-time-one to focus on communicating the lesson objective and teach new information immediately. Attendance and other items may be tended to during the ten minutes assigned for student practice. Prime-time-two may be used for reflection, review and a final discussion of the new learning acquired. This method is simple to incorporate, time-effective, and may help students to focus, learn, and retain information.
Photography Credit: White Matter Fibers, HCP Dataset Full side-view. White matter fiber architecture of the brain. Measured from diffusion spectral imaging (DSI). The fibers are color-coded by direction: red = left-right, green = anterior-posterior, blue = up-down. Courtesy of the Laboratory of Nuero Imaging and Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Consortium of of the Human Connectome Project www.humanconnectomeproject.org
We can trigger relational memories and activate the hippocampus, where connections are made with the new information that allow it to be coded into recognizable and storable patterns.
Judy Willis, Neurologist, Educator, and Author