Mnemonic Strategies & Teaching Science Content

“In teaching new content, good teachers not only tell their students what is important to remember, they give them ways to remember it.” After reading an article regarding mnemonic strategies, I discovered new techniques that are used to help students with mild-to-moderate disabilities learn concepts more efficiently. This strategy involves remembering content ideas by linking new information to prior knowledge in a student’s schema such as a familiar object, idea or experience. There are three types of mnemonic strategies, which include keyword, pegword, and letter. Each strategy can be used in order to teach a variety of content throughout many different grade levels.

The following website includes examples of how to use each strategy in teaching students science content: http://www.k8accesscenter.org/training_resources/mnemonics_science.asp

I think that the keyword and letter strategies would be the easiest for students with disabilities to incorporate in learning science vocabulary. The keyword strategy involves recognizing a “key word” or similar sounding familiar word contained in a new vocabulary word or concept being taught. This embedded “key word” is then associated with and used to remember the definition of the concept taught. Whereas memorizing words using the letter strategy involves forming acronyms and acrostics or “sentence mnemonics” by creating a phrase or sentence based on the initial letters of a group of concept words.

Based on my own experiences with these techniques, typically the letter mnemonics allow for the most creativity in constructing frameworks to remember information. Generally speaking, the goal is to make mnemonics memorable. In constructing mnemonics, the funnier and more outrageous the mnemonic is, the easier it will be for the student to recall the information represented by the memorized association. Overall, these processing and memory strategies promote students with disabilities to break down complex concepts into smaller and more manageable parts, lightening their cognitive load in encoding and storing information in their long-term memory. Thus, when explicitly taught how to independently construct these memory devices, students with mild-to-moderate disabilities can learn and better process information to become more scientifically literate.

Reference:
The Access Center. USING MNEMONIC INSTRUCTION TO TEACH SCIENCE. http://www.k8accesscenter.org/training_resources/mnemonics_science.asp