A teacher’s role is twofold: first, to help students grasp the material, and second, to make sure those students can retain what they’ve learned. It is easier to learn efficiently or attain permanent academic success with the ability to remember what one has learned. Here, we’ll look into strategies backed by research that has been shown to improve students’ ability to learn and retain the material. Drawing, summarizing, questioning methods, peer teaching, retrieval practice, spacing practice, and varied or interleaving practices are all areas where we hope to expand our understanding through our research into reputable sources. This study aims to get an in-depth familiarity with these strategies and their application in a middle school setting, namely one that serves a largely Hispanic student body in an urban area of Texas. In addition to helping us improve our students’ comprehension and memory, the data and artifacts we created for this work will make excellent additions to our professional portfolios.
SECTION A
I want to teach my eighth graders the value of evocative language by incorporating a unit on it into our English Language Arts curriculum. The goal of the training will be to help my students to be able to identify and effectively employ descriptive language in their writing at the end of the lesson.
Drawing or summarizing the issue can improve students’ capacity to acquire and retain information. To add sketching or summarizing to the lecture, I would have the students create a visual version of a descriptive paragraph. This would be done to bring the community closer together. For instance, I suggest students read a chapter heavy on sensory elements and metaphors, then draw what they see as the author’s intent. I could gauge how well they understood the material from their answers. Children who read this will learn to value the power of words to create vivid mental images. Each kid would get their paragraph to read, and then they’d have to draw or write a quick description of what they learned. This is a great activity to do individually or with a classmate. Students become aware of the paragraph’s use of descriptive language, facilitating a new mode of comprehension and, hopefully, retention. Research by Hidi and his colleagues in 1986 indicated that summarizing efficiently improved comprehension and memory (Hidi et al., 1986, pp. 473-493). Students who were instructed in summary strategies outperformed their counterparts who were not in both reading comprehension and long-term memory retention measures. Both types of students experienced this.
The use of specific avenues of research can also encourage deep learning. To promote analytical and critical thinking, I will change up the question types in my class on descriptive language. The following are some illustrations of open-ended inquiries: “Why is descriptive language vital in writing?” and “How does the reader’s experience change as a result of descriptive language?” Can you cite an instance of descriptive language from the preceding chapter? It is yet another instrument in my toolbox. According to Collins and Smith’s research, students who were given this form of inquiry were more likely to engage in critical thinking and dig further into the subject matter (Collins & Smith, 2017, pp. 47-53). After being taught how to create and reply to higher-order questions, students’ critical thinking and information-processing abilities significantly improved.
One more successful method for promoting more in-depth learning is using peer instruction. As part of the same session on descriptive language, I may have the students work in pairs to find and discuss instances of descriptive language in their writing or published works. These examples could come from the students or authors of other works. They would have the opportunity to develop their analytical skills as well as the ability to learn from one another if they did this. In 2013, researchers Furrer and Skinner demonstrated that students taught by their classmates had a superior ability to recall information over a longer period and a more in-depth comprehension of the subject matter. (Furrer & Skinner, 2013, pp. 1-12). According to the study’s findings, participants who were trained to become instructors saw considerable improvements not just in their grasp of the subject but also in their capacity to apply it in real-world circumstances.
SECTION B
This assignment requires me to analyze a unit on persuasive writing taught to eighth-grade English language arts (ELA) students in a middle school in a predominantly Hispanic metropolitan area. The course content standards include the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) for reading and writing. The Common Core State Standards are linked to these guidelines. At the end of this unit, students should show that they can write an effective persuasive essay by employing the necessary rhetorical strategies and appropriate supporting information.
The lesson on persuasive writing will include numerous low-stakes tests that will be distributed as part of retrieval practice tactics. Students can use these assessments to test their retention of key concepts and skills learned throughout the unit. After discussing persuasive techniques with my students, I suggest giving them a short exam asking them to identify such techniques in the text. In 2014, Brown and coworkers demonstrated that retrieval practice could significantly enhance information retention and knowledge transfer (Brown et al., 2014, n.p). They found that students who engaged in retrieval practice performed better on assessments and could better generalize what they knew to new situations.
By breaking down both the instruction and the practice into smaller, more manageable pieces and giving students time between each chunk to process and integrate the information they have acquired, chances for spaced practice can be built into the unit on persuasive writing. For instance, after introducing the concept of counterarguments to the class, I can assign them a separate writing task to complete for a few days before bringing up the topic again in a later lesson. Spreading out study periods can help students retain more information over time. According to studies by Cepeda and coworkers, spaced practice improves long-term memory compared to massed practice, in which all of the material is learned simultaneously (Cepeda et al., 2006, p.354).
One option to integrate varied or interleaving strategies into a course on persuasive writing is to have students write different types of essays at different times. Students might gain from this by learning to recognize the nuances of each writing mode and by expanding their ability to apply knowledge in new contexts. For instance, once students have mastered the skill of persuasive essay writing, they might move on to analyzing a literary work before returning to practice. Research by Rohrer and Taylor shows that interleaving several types of practice is more effective for learning and memory retention than blocked practice, in which students work on a single activity for an extended period (Rohrer & Taylor, 2007, pp. 481-498).
References
Brown, P. C., Roediger III, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press.
Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological bulletin, 132(3), 354.
Collins, C. H., & Smith, P. C. (2017). Teaching Critical Thinking Skills through Questioning. Journal of Adult Education, 46(2), 47-53.
Furrer, M. M., & Skinner, H. R. (2013). Sense of relatedness, learning-related emotions, and achievement: A mediation model. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 38(1), 1-12.
Hidi, S., & Anderson, V. (1986). Producing written summaries: Task demands, cognitive operations, and implications for instruction. Review of educational research, 56(4), 473-493.
Rohrer, D., & Taylor, K. (2007). The shuffling of mathematics problems improves learning. Instructional Science, 35, 481-498.
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