Long-Term Memory Strategies

Teachers, tutors and parents can each play a different, yet important role in modeling and teaching children effective strategies to improve memory related school performance. Parents, with support from private tutors, should take responsibility for helping children to become automatic with basic skills and procedures in math, reading, spelling and writing so that over time, the students have increased their speed and accuracy in these basic areas.

Children who demonstrate automatic retrieval of basic skills are able to focus more on thinking and problem-solving while retrieving information. Parents, with support from their child’s teacher/tutor should set up and enforce effective study habits and routines at home. An effective structure and routine, with small doses of repeated practice on basic skills can make a huge positive difference in school performance. Parents and tutors may need to advocate for a child to use advance organizers and/or electronic devices and assistive technology tools. (See previous article on Assistive Technology) in the school setting. Organizers and useful tools and resources that match a child’s needs can allow a child to work more productively while directing more effort into higher-level work.

A young child who does not need to focus on letter formation or spelling is free to develop ideas for writing. An older child who uses a calculator and/or printed resources to gain quicker access to basic facts and/or procedures is able to focus more thought and energy into solving complex math problems.

Effective teaching practices can help these children to make more meaningful connections between prior learning and new learning while increasing their understanding of new information and concepts, and retrieving and applying learned information to new situations. A combination of strategies that include effective teaching and differentiation techniques, skill building, and “work-arounds” are listed below.

• Explicit teaching of organization strategies, time management, note taking skills,
• How to use graphic organizers, how to study for tests, how to prioritize information, how to self monitor, how to elaborate, and how to summarize new information.
• Teachers can reinforce learning of new information when they use analogies, use questioning and discussion techniques that guide a child to make information meaningful, incorporate ways for a child use and apply new information in a variety of ways.
• Ongoing assessment, allowing a child more time to remember, alternate forms of assessment and open ended questions and learning tasks that substitute recongition memory tasks for tasks that require recall memory are additional strategies that can allow a child a more comfortable outlet for communicating their understandings while allowing a teacher to assess their progress.

Finally, parents can teach their children that memory is like a muscle. They more memory is used, the stronger it gets!

If your child is struggling with memory tasks, find a tutor who can help with developing memory strategies.