If you’re a teacher you know that a student’s mind can wander during the course of a lesson or class. You also know that you want to get as much information into their brain while you have their attention. You might think that different students are focused and/or will lose their attention at different times. While there are certainly individual differences, studies suggest that there are common patterns shown by all students.
The Serial Positions test, one of the most reproducible cognitive tests known, demonstrates that there are absolute times when your class is likely to be at their most attentive, and also when the class is most likely to lose focus. Clearly, we want to get as much important information to them during their peaks of attention!
In the Serial Positions test, subjects are shown a series of words for 2 seconds each. They are told to try to remember as many of the words as possible after the list is presented. When the test is scored, the results are consistent with the graph below:
Serial Positions Effect (Click to enlarge)
Psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists interpret these results to indicate that in a “learning session” students remember most of what is presented at the beginning and end of the session, with very little recall of what is presented in the middle of the learning session.
The initial level of high recall is usually attributed to the “Primacy” effect. That is, students tend to focus and process information early in a learning session. This could be for various reasons. For example, it may be because the brain is preparing for new information and is therefore paying extreme attention to the initial moments of a session. This attention and information processing then wanes as the session progresses. The student gets tired of thinking.
The upward level of retention following the trough of low retention is usually ascribed to as the “Recency” effect. This elevated level of recall is generally thought to be due to the notion of short-term memory. That is, whatever was presented last in the learning session would be remembered simply because it remains in short-term memory and is not replaced with new information.
These results suggest that we may want to begin the learning session with a straightforward statement of what we wish to teach during the upcoming learning session and end the session with a review of the most important information.
We should be careful not to overload the information given between the Primacy and Recency effect. Increasing the “amount’ of information included in a learning session simply increases the amount of information that is forgotten and does little to increase the amount of information that is remembered! In the graph below, you can see the same Primacy and Recency effect, regardless of how long the list is:
Serial Positions Effect: Length of List (Click to enlarge)
How does this relate to Block Scheduling where a typical class period is 60 or 90 minutes? It’s likely that cognitive gain can be realized by breaking up any learning session into smaller “bites”. That is, while a longer learning session may produce a trough of retention, breaking a 60 or 90 minute period into three learning “sections” of 20 or 30 minutes each may reduce low recall times and increase time spent in Primacy and Recency states.
Share your thoughts! How can we break extended learning sessions into smaller bites that students perceive as separate events? I would love to hear about approaches you take in your own classrooms that might be related to the research we have discussed here. Please share by commenting below!
