Teaching history in elementary school is one which presents difficult challenges in the social sciences area. While events and people involved are considered most important in history classes, the dates to which they occurred should never be treated of less significance. However, students tend to hate factual things which appeared with numbers attached on it. Students may appreciate the events and its importance and they may even find the people involved in the making of history interesting. However, they are less likely to be interested in memorizing dates. This results to lower performance in associating events and the time to which they took place.
The human brain is an interesting piece of art. It can process and store numerous information. However, most of the things that are taught inside the classroom do not last long inside the memory network thus resulting in low retrieval. People forget about 40 percent of the information 20 minutes after they were learned. This is a big problem especially if students do not show interest on what they are told to learn, like historical dates.
It is in the nature of man to forget and for this, numerous devices were conceptualized to improve the human brain, its capacity to store and recall. The dual-coding theory of Paivio, maintain that there are two different but interconnected symbolic processing systems exist for encoding information- one verbal and the other, nonverbal. They propose that information is coded in verbal, non-verbal, or both systems. The mnemonic technique explicitly requires dual coding in that nonverbal images are initially generated from words during list learning, then regenerated from verbal cues during recall, and finally decoded back into words. Thus, during classroom sessions, information coming from the teacher were coded verbally. With the aid of mnemonics, an image will be embedded together with the information in the memory strengthening the association and increasing the chance for efficient retrieval.
There are various ways to improve memorization. Rote learning is a technique which focuses not on the understanding but on memorizing facts by means of repetition. The mnemonic, on the other hand, is a special type of memory aid which relies on associations between easy-to-remember constructs which can be related back to the data that is to be remembered. Shmidman&Ehri contended that mnemonics are effective when they speed up learning, reduce confusion among similar items, and enhance long-term retention and application of the information. According to Cohen and Aphek association is a mnemonic link to some element or elements that would help in recall of the word, including a link to meaning, sound, sound and meaning together, structure, context, mental image, letter(s) in the word, proper names, signs and so forth.
The peg system, on the other hand, is a technique for memorizing lists. It works by pre-memorizing a list of words that are easy to associate with the numbers they represent (1 to 10, 1-100, 1-1000, etc.). Those objects form the “pegs” of the system. Then in the future, to rapidly memorize a list of arbitrary objects, each one is associated with the appropriate peg. Generally, a peglist only has to be memorized one time, and can then be used over and over every time a list of items needs to be memorized. The peglists are generated from words that are easy to associate with the numbers (or letters). Peg lists created from letters of the alphabet or from rhymes are very simple to learn, but are limited in the number of pegs they can produce.
The Major system, the system used by the study, is a mnemonic technique used to aid in memorizing numbers which is also called the phonetic number system or phonetic mnemonic system. It works by converting numbers first into consonant sounds, then into words by adding vowels. The words can then be remembered more easily than the numbers, especially when using other mnemonic rules which call for the words to be visual and emotive.
By: Melinda C. Raposa | Teacher III | Limay Elementary School | Limay, Bataan
