I am an English teacher in Japan, mostly catering to children and young people, and it is has been my experience that if you set words and sentences or grammar patterns to music, the kids learn the stuff very quickly and it sticks permanently inmost cases.
I remember my physics teacher setting laws and equations to music and I remember bits of them even twenty five years and no interest later!
Standard mnemonics work too, where the initial letter of each word in a funny sentence stands for some date or whatever.
So, we know that such mnemonic devices work, but WHY do they work, and HOW do they work?
9th grade biology class, set to the tune of “Row row row your boat”:
*We love DNA
Made of nucleotides
A phosphate sugar and a base
Bonded down both sides
Adenine and Thymine
Make a lovely pair
Guanine without cytosine
Would be very bare*
I would assume we remember mnemonics because they take the information at hand, and turn it into another class of information that may be easier to store.
I mean, who doesn’t think of Roy G Biv as another joe shmoe, instead of thinking each and every time…“Oh yeah, that is the phrase used to remember the colors of the spectrum (Visible light spectrum, for those who are sure to correct me on it later) in order…”
HOMES seems to take up less space than Huron Ontario what ever the M one is Erie and Superior. ((Yes, I know the mnemonic but never knew all of the rivers))
Lastly, Its ________er to remember Kings Play Cards On Fat Green Stools than to remember Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species. I make it blank becuase there are many words you can put there, and in fact they will all work… easier, cooler, nicer, etc.
It’s a psychological effect called chunking. The Human short term memory can only hold 7 “chunks” (+ or - 2) at one time. By using mnemonics, you can store a greater amount of information into each chunk which helps keep the entire thing in your short term so they get absorbed faster.
It’s not just that though is it? What you do, partly, is very quickly tie the information down to stuff you already know. Songs and rhyme also achieve something almost like a checksum effect - there’s a much more limited number of words that fit the rhythm and rhymes, so they are easier to retrieve. And then of course information that comes from multiple sensory sources is also linked, paid attention to and remembered much more strongly. It’s like the research that shows that babies who see a horse on tv and hear it pay a lot more attention than when they hear a horse or see one.
I would suspect that sentence creation mnemonics work because of their arrangement into a grammatical structure, something that exploites one of the brain’s key strengths. Also, the use of mnemonics presupposes a certain commitment to memorization.
I would suspect that sentence creation mnemonics work because of their arrangement into a grammatical structure, something that exploits one of the brain’s key strengths. Also, the use of mnemonics presupposes a certain commitment to memorization.
These are’t mnemonics, but if you want to get some silly sciece factoids (and bad music) permanently stuck in your head, go here http://www.acme.com/jef/science_songs/ and listen to some of these a couple of times.
Like I said I wasn’t too sure on the Homes mnemonic. :rolleyes:
There was one for the Quadratic Equation. It was set to the tune of All around the mulbery bush. I didn’t learn it in 8th grade Algebra, and now some 8 years later, I still don’t have it memorized. But as Larry the Cable guy points out (Incorrectly on top of that) When will we use that?