week 8

instructional strategies for fact learning popularly include organisation, linking and elaboration.

i feel that organisation is the most popular form of learning for most of the information we attain today. in organisation, learners arrange information gleaned in a way that is meaningful to them, hence aiding in memory retention. an example of organising would be trying to remember the characteristics of a lion as being part of certain concepts such as the cat family, a mammal and a carnivore. a sub-set of organisation is chunking, where individuals group or "chunk" information together. an example of this would be attempting to recall the following numbers: 19855552009. different learners chunk information in different ways. so for me, i would remember this number better if i chunk it as such: 1985 (the year i was born), 555 (triple five) and 2009 (the current year).

linking refers to the use of mnemonics in enhancing recall and memory. jingles, rhymes and acronyms all offer examples of memory by linking. fast food delivery numbers usually make use of both chunking and jingles in helping their customers better recall their number over their competitors. hearing the familiar tune of the pizza hut jingle instantly allows us to remember its hot line and gives way to images of scrumptious, piping hot pizzas.

lastly, elaboration is perhaps the most traditional form of recall and memory. learners try to understand certain information and apply their relatedness in their daily lives. elaboration requires a fair amount of analysis and critical thinking and is usually the learning method commonly used in higher education. it involves not merely remembering and spilling out information but rather understanding the whys and hows of particular phenomenon. however, i feel that elaboration is one of the most challenging, but effective ways of memory: once we understand why a certain issue occurs, we are less likely to forget about it.

with the vast amount of information we are bombarded with everyday, is it impossible and unnecessary to make sense of and elaborate every piece of information we encounter. elaboration is best used for very abstract issues, linking for basic factual information and organisation for everything else is between.