The Anatomy of Memory in the Classroom: Understanding How Students Acquire Memory Processes From Classroom Activities in Science and Social Studies Units

Abstract

This article is concerned with understanding how the recall required of students during typical science and social study units might shape the development of their memory. The recall required of students of a visiting speaker's talk in an integrated science and social studies unit on Antarctica is analyzed and related to the context of activities in which it was embedded. It was found that the students' recall exhibited genre-like patterning that could be related to the ways the teacher structured and guided the students' involvement in recall activities and to the interactions between the students themselves. However, the genre analysis failed to account for the continuities and discontinuities in what students recalled in successive classroom activities. An alternative schema-based model of the way students processed their experiences in working memory and created new knowledge in long-term memory was used to explain how students recalled the visiting speaker's talk. In the final section, it is argued that the processes by which students acquire and remember new knowledge are the product of internalizing the genre-like structures they use and experience during classroom recall activities. The implications of this analysis for revising and expanding our views of what students learn from classroom experiences are identified.

Fostering Analysis in Historical Inquiry Through Multimedia Embedded Scaffolding

“…However, developing the cognitive and metacognitive strategies that are specifically designed to help a student analyze one historical source and to carefully and reflectively sift through the "layers of inference" of a historical source is a vital foundation from which to work with multiple sources and the corroboration of evidence in order to develop knowledge of the past. Nuthall (2000) suggests that "facilitating student use of a variety of different language and activity structures through a variety of different media and using a variety of different tools may be the best way to have a deep and lasting effect on how students acquire and use their knowledge" (p. 301). The development of the SCIM Historical Inquiry Tutorial represents one attempt to provide the activity structures and language necessary to help scaffold the teaching and learning of the historical inquiry process by providing both teachers and students with opportunities to think about their own learning as they work with historical sources.…”

Students? knowledge about the value of discussions for teaching and learning

“…More recently, studies such as Nuthall and Alton-Lees' (Nuthall, 1997(Nuthall, , 2000a 'listening in' program have attempted to probe the ways in which students' discourse contributes to their knowledge construction. In Nuthall and Alton-Lees' detailed investigations of students' talk, the researchers recorded and categorised whole class, small group and individual activities.…”

Vocational knowledge and its specification

“…Halldén, 1999;Pozo et al, 1999;Schnotz & Preuß, 1999). There is now considerable evidence that individual capacities and the cognitive representations that are posited as being involved are closely linked to the situation in which the capacity (and its representation) was developed, and encompass normative judgements, conceptual understanding, rules for action, personal epistemologies and affect (Glaser, 1990;Lave & Wenger, 1991;Nuthall, 2000;Perkins et al, 1993;Stevenson, 1999;Tobach et al, 1997). Moreover, recently, Nuthall (2000) has adduced evidence for the embedding of social phenomena in schemata.…”