Mnemonics

What are Mnemonics?:

Mnemonics are one of the powerful instructional strategies used to enhance learners’ retention. Mnemonics are also called as an artificial device for facilitating a learners' recall of facts, definitions, and concepts. They are most useful when learners are faced with a lot of difficult instructional materials.

Instead of feeding information to the learners, the instructor can present mnemonic techniques, and ask them to develop their own mnemonic help them to remember the information.

Here’s the basic structure of Mnemonic Devices:

#1 Organizational
a. Single: (1)acronym,(2)rhyme,(3) phrase

b. Multiple: (1)loci,(2) pegword

#2 Encoding
a. Name

b. Keyword

Types of Mnemonics:

There are two main types of mnemonics: organizational Mnemonics and Encoding Mnemonics.

#1. Organizational Mnemonic

involve using information you already know to help learn new information. Below are two sub-types of organizational mnemonics: Single Use and Multiple Use.

a. Single Use: aid in memorizing of one target and work well when order is important. Below are the three types: acronym, rhyme, and phrase.

(1) Acronyms
Example: HOMES (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior)
Example: ROY G. BIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet)

(2) Rhymes
Example: 30 days hath September …
Example: "i" before "e" except after "c" …

(3) Phrases
Example: My very earnest mother just served us nine pizzas (for the planets)
Example: Spring forward, fall back

b. Multiple Use: it can be used to memorize many targets. Below are the two types: pegword method and method of loci.

(1) Peg-word method: involves use of counting from one to ten to remember new info.
Example: One is a bun; two is a shoe; three is a tree; etc.
Uses interactive mental imagery – associating a cue with a target memory in a single image.
Like having pegs on a wall to hang coats, you can go retrieve coats off the peg. Likewise, with the peg-word method, you can retrieve items to be remembered.

(2) Method of Loci: method of locations
Uses sequence of locations that are already known
To remember items, we must picture ourselves walking through the various locations, depositing objects to be remembered in each location – a clear image must be created for each item.
To recall the items, once again, we imagine ourselves walking through locations, retrieving the items.

#2 Encoding Mnemonic:

There are the two types: Name and Keyword.

a. Name Mnemonic: a single use device for remembering names.
Example: relating a feature (real or imagined) of a person’s appearance with sounds in the person’s name).

b. Keyword Mnemonic: uses mental imagery to help people learn unfamiliar vocabulary items.
Example: Rodilla, Byelie, Zdaniyeh, chai