The Anatomy of Memory in the Classroom: Understanding How Students Acquire Memory Processes From Classroom Activities in Science and Social Studies Units

Abstract

This article is concerned with understanding how the recall required of students during typical science and social study units might shape the development of their memory. The recall required of students of a visiting speaker's talk in an integrated science and social studies unit on Antarctica is analyzed and related to the context of activities in which it was embedded. It was found that the students' recall exhibited genre-like patterning that could be related to the ways the teacher structured and guided the students' involvement in recall activities and to the interactions between the students themselves. However, the genre analysis failed to account for the continuities and discontinuities in what students recalled in successive classroom activities. An alternative schema-based model of the way students processed their experiences in working memory and created new knowledge in long-term memory was used to explain how students recalled the visiting speaker's talk. In the final section, it is argued that the processes by which students acquire and remember new knowledge are the product of internalizing the genre-like structures they use and experience during classroom recall activities. The implications of this analysis for revising and expanding our views of what students learn from classroom experiences are identified.