Memory, Active Learning and Brainstorming

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379NATIONALPARK-FORSCHUNG IN DER SCHWEIZ, 101(9), 379-383

Vol. 101, No. 9; September 2012, 379-383

NATIONALPARK-FORSCHUNG

IN DER SCHWEIZ(Switzerland Research Park Journal)

http://www.naukpublication.org

Memory, Active Learning andBrainstorming

AzadehNemati* (PhD)1, Parya Habibi (BA)2

1 (Corresponding author) Department of English Language Teaching, Jahrom Branch, Islamic Azad University,

Jahrom, Iran, [email protected]

2 Young Researchers Club, Sanandaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Sanandaj, Iran, [email protected]

ABSTRACT

Motivation, reinforcement, transference, and retention are elements of learning that must be addressed to ensure

participants learn actively. Learning a subject seems to involve three almost simultaneous processes. Acquisition,

Transformation and evaluation. Learning involves understanding and then application by the learners. Teaching may

best be defined as the organization of learning. This action research aims to make learners are more likely to enjoy

the subject, and to succeed at it if they are engaged in the learning process. An educational activity is to make

changes in the learners, changes which happen as the result of learning. Teaching may be thought of as the

establishment of a situation in which it is hoped effective learning will take place. The present study describes the

effect of brainstorming on effective learning. Active learners are more likely to enjoy the subject.

Keywords: Active learning, Motivation, Reinforcement, Encoding.

Introduction

Many teachers today want to change passive learning

to active learning, and to find better ways of engaging

students in the learning process. The relationship

between students active involvement and effective

learning is so strong that the effectiveness of any

educational policy or practice is directly related to the

capacity of that policy to increase creativity in

learning. So, when selecting among several teachingmethods or techniques, it is best to choose the ones

that allow the learners to become more involved

(Gardiner, 1998; Fink, 1999)

Learning a subject seems to involve three almost

simultaneous processes. First, there is acquisition,

transformation then evaluation. Good teaching

involves the organization of learning and the

establishment of a situation in which effective

learning will take place (Fink, 1999). Among the

points viewed differently by these schools of

psychology is the concept of learning. Hence, their

definition of learning as a change in the behavior of

organisms made no reference to the mind and when

learners should be involved in identifying their

learning needs and outcomes attainable objectives

was developed. Active learning involves the use of avariety of strategies or pedagogical projects designed

to put the responsibility for creating and/or applying

knowledge on the shoulders of students to enhance

learning. Giving the students the chance to test their

ideas, to take risks, and to be creative will promote

learning. Also take their interests, current skills, and

aims into account when selecting methods and

materials. Cognition includes attention, perception,
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learning, memory, language learning and concept

formation (Eysenck, 1994). The role of mind in

learning was taken into account and it was argued

that learning is not limited to changes in behavior

with observable manifestations, rather it is the

process by which relatively permanent changes occur

in the behavioral potential as a result of experience

(Anderson, 1995, p. 4).

Most traditional teaching consists of little more than

having students read a text and listen to a lecture, and

a limited form of dialogue with others. It was argued

that not everything we learn has an impact on our

behavior. For instance, one many learn the name of

an individual but never have the opportunity to use it.

So, learning is not just a spontaneous change in

behavior but only a change in potential of behavior.

Thus, the concept of memory as the ''relatively

permanent record of experience that underlies

learning'' (Anderson, 1995, p. 5) was taken into

account as well.

Humans have extremely complex internal systems for

performing behavioral tasks and following Atkinson

and Shiffrin, they use the analogy of computer

systems (Lutz, 1994; Eysenck & Keane, 2001) in that

information is encoded in the memory, stored there

and retrieved when necessary. Rejecting the

traditional belief that learning is acquired through an

explicit explanation of a rule followed by application

of it in the form of a mechanical drill and many

teachers have opted instead for a so-called

comprehension-based pedagogy in which students

come to know through exposure to conipreherasible

inputby themselves. Based on studies of inputprocessing, the cognitive processes that learners

employ to comprehend meaning-bearing input, Van

Patten (1996) suggests that Instruction be based on

Structured Input Activities in which learners are

given the opportunity to process the input in a

controlled situation so that better form-meaning

connections might happen compared with what goes

on in less controlled situations (p. 60). In this

approach, learners were provided with controlled

situations and be very active through giving

comprehensible input which had to be read and

processed by the students. In this method, learning is

internalized by encouraging subjects to solve

problems in much the same way that a young childsolves (constructs) his native language. For some

teachers, motivation means changing from traditional

classroom procedures to problem-solving or

collaborative projects and others define it in the

context of community language learning activities.

But it is defined here as instructional activities

involving students in doing things and thinking about

what they are doing. If students dont recognize the

need for the information, they will not learn well and

teachers efforts will be in vain. Researchers

supporting this model prefer to consider vary what

you do and how you do it. Everyteacher knows thatwhat works one day with one class, does not

necessarily work with a different class.

As the terms used in information processing approachseem to be more familiar, the following explanation

is mostly based on information processing approach,

though the connectionist viewpoint will be taken into

account when necessary.

Encoding is the process of perceiving informationand bringing it into the memory system and

conceived as recoding, or converting information

from one form to another. So when people encode

information into memory, they convert it from one

form to another to help them remember it later

(Roediger, 2003).

Comprehension and production

Great importance has been attached to students

creativity and motivative abilities. The approach

planned for teaching active learning are two phases:

comprehension and production. Comprehensioncomes first, because it is the way we expect grammar

structures to be processed and learned before they can

emerge in learners output. Learning is made

meaningful when it serves a communicative function

or conveys an idea to the students, and the logic

behind presenting grammar through texts is to make

them integrate fun,.. , picture, feedback, variety of

strategies, new ideas ones in arriving at a joint

understanding of the passage. After the formation of

different hypotheses by different groups, the teacher

reads all the alternatives to every group, and asks

them to justify their consensus about the way the new

works. It is said that most of the early childhood

memories are encoded as images or pictures. In a

variety of experiments researchers have demonstrated

the benefits of mental images. Storage is retaining

encoded information over time.

The process of learning in traditional approaches

Learners are given isolated sentences, which are

expected to be internalized through exercises

involving repetition, manipulation, and grammatical

transformation. These exercises are designed to

External

Events

External

Events

Short term

Memory

Long term

Memory

Sensory input

Attention to important

And novel stimuli Encoding

Encoding

A simplified model of human memory (Myers, 1996, p. 225)


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provide learners with formal, declarative mastery, but

often dont provide opportunities for learners to

explore grammatical structures in context. Hence,

they make the task of developing procedural skill

being able to use the language for communication

more difficult than it needs to be, because learners are

denied the opportunity of seeing the systematic

relationships that exist between form, meaning, and

use.

Put another way, students with creative activities

with motivated target should precede productive

activities. Students should become aware that the

ultimate goal of language learning. Approaches that

activate students minds to learn how they can use

structures correctly and effectively to interact with

others are needed.

Retrieval and why people forget?The main process in remembering is retrieval or

bringing information from long term memory toworking memory. A retrieval cue is any stimulus that

helps us to recall information in long term memory

and cues can cause us to suddenly remember

something from years ago. The fact that retrieval cues

can provoke powerful recollections has led some

researchers to speculate that perhaps all memories are

permanent and forgetting is just the matter of failing

to retrieve them, an idea which is challenged by many

other psychologists (Roediger, 2003). Encoding

specificity means that a stimulus may act as a

retrieval cue for an experience if it is encoded with

that experience. Distinctiveness is another feature

that determines the effectiveness of the retrieval cues.So the more effective retrieval cues attached to an

item, the better it would be recalled. Up to here, we

have focused on information processing model as

represented by Atkinson and Shiffrin. But as already

stated, there are some psychologists who have

disputed and criticized this model. Among them,

Craik and Lockhart (1972) argued that memory

depends on the depth of processing. They also felt

that Atkinson and Shiffrin had provided an

oversimplified view of rehearsal. According to them,

there are different types of rehearsal. Type 1 or

maintenance rehearsal involves repetition of the

processes which have already been carried out .Type

2 or elaborative rehearsal, involves deeper processingof the stimulus material that is to be learned and it

was claimed that type 2 rehearsal improves long term

memory while type one does not. Forgetting is

usually defined as the loss of information over time

(Roediger, 2003). However, the rate of this loss is not

the same. Many experiments done in this regard

indicate that forgetting is rapid at first but gradually

slows down (Baddeley, 1999, P. 109). But the

question is why forgetting occurs at all. Psychologists

have proposed four explanations.According to the first explanation which is called

decay hypothesis of forgetting, memory trace

simply fades or decays over time rather like a notice

which is exposed to the sun and rain and gradually

fades until it becomes illegible. But the fact that wesometimes remember information totally forgotten

indicates that this explanation is rather problematic.

The second explanation which is called interference

hypothesis maintains that we forget things because

of the interference from other information or

activities and a distinction is made between two kinds

of interference: proactive and retroactive. Proactive

interference occurs when prior learning troubles the

recall and retrieval of newer information. Retrieval

cue hypothesis, forgetting occurs because we lose

access to the cues which help to retrieve the required

information. To prove this hypothesis, its advocates

have done some experiments using free recall and

recognition tests. In free recall tests, subjects are

asked to memorize a list and then they are asked to

remember it. But in recognition tests, they are

provided with some cues such as which of the

following words was in the list? It was found that

subjects could perform much better on recognition

tests which may be due to this fact that in recognition

tests, there are retrieval cues which contribute to the

memory.Finally it is assumed that another cause of forgetting

resides in the concept of repression which refers to

forgetting as an unpleasant event or piece of

information due to its threatening quality. So the realcause of forgetting negative experience may be the

fact that they are not usually coded carefully and in

details.

Brainstorming encourages better learning

Some learners are more successful than others and in

order to find out why, Rubin, (1981) studied the

characteristics of good learners. Four of these

characteristics are discussed below. These may

explain why brainstorming is a useful tool in our

classrooms. The good learners make intelligent

guesses, hut the language classroom often works

against this. Because of nervousness in a foreign

language or fear of teacher correction, many students

are afraid of using language unless they are sure that

it is totally correct. This stops them making

intelligent guesses and slows down learning. The

active learner uses the context of language to help in

comprehension but the foreign language classroom

can often seem artificial. We can say Brainstorming

is a process for developing creative solutions to


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problems at all. Brainstorming works by focusing on

a problem, and then deliberately coming up with as

many solutions as possible and by pushing the ideas

as far as possible. One of the reasons it is so effective

is that the barnstormers not only come up with new

ideas in a session, but also spark off from

associations with other people's ideas by developing

and refining them. While some research has found

brainstorming to be ineffective, this seems more of a

problem with the research itself than with the

brainstorming tool.Active learners organize information about

languageGood learners try to organize their knowledge. As

teachers, we can try to facilitate this organization by

using suitable warm-up activities. A warm-up activity

can remind our students of existing knowledge. At

the same time, it can direct their minds towards ideas

that they will meet in the main activity. In this way, itprovides a link between new and existing knowledge.However, each learner has a different store of

existing knowledge organized in a unique way. A

textbook or teacher presentation can never use this

knowledge to its potential. In many warm-up

activities, the teacher and students can be frustrated

because the organization of language in the warm-up

activities is different from the organization in the

learners minds. This mismatch is a block to good

learning. In my idea good learners find their own way

and take charge of their own learning.Students who do not take charge of their ownlearning are unable to take full advantage of learning

opportunities. This is problem that faces many Asian

students who are generally more reserved than

Western students. Many teachers find that lack of

self-initiative is usually more of a problem than lack

of ability in conversation classes.

ConclusionThe end of any an educational activity is to

make changes in the learners, changes which happen

as the result of learning. Learning involves

understanding and then application by the learners.

Forgetting is defined as losing information. We cansay because of some practical answers: 1) People

forget because of stress or fatigue 2) People forget

because they have too many things to do 3) People

forget because their attention is somewhere else. The

memory is not able to process the information

completely 4) People forget something because they

do not have a genuine lasting interest in it 5) People

forget because things get too familiar 6) People

forget because of the daily grind 7) People forget

because they remember things differently 8) People

forget simply because it happened a long time ago 9)

People forget because they choose to forget10)

People forget because of trauma or accidents11)

People forget because of aging and disease. Learners

are more likely to enjoy the subject, and to succeed at

it if they are engaged in the learning process, and as

far as possible, have a chance to influence what

happens, and how it happens.

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