Mnemonics

Objective: This job aid will introduce you to the strategy of mnemonics as a means to enhance your students' retention.

Definition

Mnemonics are one of powerful instructional strategies used to enhance learners’ retention. Mnemonics are also called an artificial device for facilitating a learner's 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 to help them remember the information.

Organizational Mnemonics

Involve using information you already know to help learn new information.

• Single Use: aid in memorizing of one target and work well when order is important.
  • Acronyms

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

  • Rhymes

  Examples:
  30 days hath September …
  "i" before "e" except after "c" …

  • Phrases

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

• Multiple Use: it can be used to memorize many targets.
  • Peg-word method

  involves use of counting from one to ten to remember new info. 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.

  Example: One is a bun; two is a shoe; three is a tree; etc.

  • 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.

Organizational Mnemonics

• 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.

• Keyword mnemonic: uses mental imagery to help people learn unfamiliar vocabulary items.

Example: Rodilla, Byelie, Zdaniyeh, chai

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