Dr. Samar Zebian - We live in an oral culture. Orality requires skilled memory: to site proverbs, for bantering, to narrate our lives, to tell stories and invoke texts in speeches and rhetorical exchanges. It is important in poetic dueling and repartee and other oral improvisations. Even in schools today, where we aim to manufacture literate young adults, the oral tradition is alive and strong in Lebanon. Myself and collaborators, who were engaged in a national video study of mathematics education, were amazed at how little public and private school teachers wrote on the board and the extent to which teachers expected students to learn mathematics orally. This occurrence is common in a historically oral culture even in Lebanon with its relatively high literacy rate (compared to countries in the region).

Living in an oral culture requires memory –it is a survival skill and when it is honed it has significant social currency. Given this, one may ask whether Lebanese students, who have been socialized in this oral tradition, have good memory skills and whether these skills serve them in the school context (setting aside other contexts for the time being)?

Let’s consider a common scene especially during the BAC exam period: students repeating texts aloud, often with some repetitive motion; pacing, tapping, rocking. This memory strategy is pervasive especially in oral cultures and is likely supported by a folk (intuitive) theory of mind which goes like this: memories are consolidated with repetition. But, the catch is that the quality of the memories acquired through rote repetition is not very good. The information might get in, but it is hard to retrieve it without a specific cue. Also the amount of information that can be stored with rote recall is limited unless an individual has developed elaborate memory schemas and is motivated to remember and if the memory task is buttressed by a social context. Researchers have also found that rote memories fade quickly and do not easily get connected to already stored/learned knowledge.

Cognitive scientists who study how people member and learn, have found more effective strategies for students.

Those who study well and remember with ease, know that it is necessary to elaborate and make personal connections with what one is learning. Researchers have confirmed that connecting new information with what is already known ensures that students accumulate stable memories which are connected to existing knowledge.

Research has also shown that it is important not to study new information in a short period of time but to space out study sessions. This strategy allows time for forgetting. Counter intuitively, the process of forgetting is necessary for effective relearning because it provides an opportunity for encoding the information in new ways-something absolutely essential for long term retention.

It is best not to study in the same spot. Some parents set up a quiet study place and encourage their children to study only in this place. Considerable research however suggests that variation in the physical context (given that the contexts are relatively quiet and conducive to studying) results in higher recall and also less retroactive interference—that is , less forgetting of previously learned information. Researchers encourage students to study indoors, outdoors, with friends, alone, with/without background noise. This strategy maximizes the number of retrieval cues.

A final researched technique for improving study habits and memory is to make honest and real assessments of how much one knows and does not know. This can be done by doing problems without looking at the answers or the text. It may seem like a simple technique but what it does is counteract the all too common “illusion of knowledge”-our belief that we know more than we actually do. Focusing on what you don’t know, in an objective non-judgmental way, has been shown to improve studying.

The memory skills and strategies (some borrowed some invented anew) acquired by children growing up in historically oral cultures currently in transition to new forms of orality and literacy may serve them well in some settings and for some practices. Rote rehearsal, however, is not necessarily an effective all-purpose strategy. Orality studies have shown that rote rehearsal is but one among many memory strategies used by proficient reciters. Other strategies involve use of meter & rhyme, images that form thematic plots and alliteration and so on. If you a looking to make substantive changes in the way your children learn, the above might offer you some starting points.