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While this article is directed towards teachers, students can leverage this information to their advantage. Employ the following five strategies to aid retention: 1. Teach a friend. When students explain what they've learned to peers, fading memories are reactivated, strengthened, and consolidated. This strategy not only increases retention but also encourages active learning (Sekeres et al., 2016). 2. The spacing effect: Instead of covering a topic and then moving on, revisit key ideas throughout the school year. Research shows that students perform better academically when given multiple opportunities to review learned material. For example, teachers can quickly incorporate a brief review of what was covered several weeks earlier into ongoing lessons, or use homework to re-expose students to previous concepts (Carpenter et al., 2012; Kang, 2016). 3. Frequent practice tests: Akin to regularly reviewing material, giving frequent practice tests can boost long-term retention and, as a bonus, help protect against stress, which often impairs memory performance. Breaking down one large high-stakes test into smaller tests over several months is an effective approach (Adesope, Trevisan, & Sundararajan, 2017; Butler, 2010; Karpicke, 2016). 4. Interleave concepts: Instead of grouping similar problems together, mix them up. Solving problems involves identifying the correct strategy to use and then executing the strategy. When similar problems are grouped together, students don't have to think about what strategies to use-they automatically apply the same solution over and over. Interleaving forces students to think on their feet, and encodes learning more deeply (Rohrer, 2012; Rohrer, Dedrick, & Stershic, 2015). 5. Combine text with images: It's often easier to remember information that's been presented in different ways, especially if visual aids can help organize information. For example, pairing a list of countries occupied by German forces during World War II wi

As well as making signage clearer, it's been shown that an easy-to-read typeface might convince your brain that a given task is easier to perform because information printed in a legible typeface ostensibly requires less mental effort to understand and process. Interestingly, some studies suggest when words are harder to process, people pay more attention to what the words actually say; because of that, the memory trace becomes stronger, aiding comprehension and retention. Printing something in hard-to-read font increases "desirable difficulty," the addition of an obstruction to the learning process that requires you to put in just enough effort, which leads to better memory retention and deeper cognitive processing." For those of you who might be interested in testing desirable difficulty out, the author suggests an experimental design.

There are two hypotheses to why note-taking is beneficial in the first place. The first idea is called the encoding hypothesis, which says that when a person is taking notes, "the processing that occurs" will improve "learning and retention." The second, called the external-storage hypothesis, is that you learn by being able to look back at your notes, or even the notes of other people. A 2014 study published in _Psychological Science_, co-written by Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles, suggests that taking longhand notes may have superior external storage as well as superior encoding functions, in comparison to taking notes via laptop.

The trick to being a good reader, no matter the medium, is being an engaged reader. Research suggests taking notes and annotating text, whether done traditionally or via digital annotation, aids both comprehension and retention.

Recently, people have been returning to writing basics: handwriting, notebooks, pens, paper, and stationary. While technology can certainly provide an edge for certain tasks, digital overload, addiction, and distraction are growing concerns. many studies indicate that multitasking is bad for us and makes our brains more scattered. In contrast, several studies suggest that pen and paper have an edge over the keyboard. In three studies, researchers found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. Those who took written notes had better comprehension and retention of material because they had to mentally process information rather than type it verbatim. And, another study, published in the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology, showed that people who doodle can better recall dull information. Writing it down also sparks innovation. Being innovative and creative is about "getting your hands dirty" a feeling that is lacking when you use technology or gadgets, says Arvind Malhotra, a professor at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School."Research has also shown that tactile sensory perceptions tend to stimulate parts of the brain that are associated with creativity. So, touch, feel and the sensation you get when you build something physical has also got a lot to do with creativity," he says.

Linguists can generally be divided into two groups: prescriptivists, or those who hold that language is governed by fixed rules of grammar, and descriptivists, or those who believe that patterns of actual usage reflect the way the language is used. In extremely broad strokes, if prescriptivists are anal retentive, then descriptivists are free-to-be-you-and-me.

Fascinating article on language learning using an app called Memrise. The company's goal: to take all of cognitive science's knowhow about what makes information memorable, and combine it with all the knowhow from social gaming about what makes an activity fun and addictive, and develop a web app that can help anyone memorise anything. Two takeaways for language learning, and acquiring and retaining any subject matter: 1. Elaborative encoding. The more context and meaning you can attach to a piece of information, the likelier it is that you'll be able to fish it out of your memory at some point in the future. And the more effort you put into creating the memory, the more durable it will be. One of the best ways to elaborate a memory is to try visually to imagine it in your mind's eye. If you can link the sound of a word to a picture representing its meaning, it'll be far more memorable than simply learning the word by rote. Create mnemonics for vocabulary. 2. "Spaced repetition". Cognitive scientists have known for more than a century that the best way to secure memories for the long term is to impart them in repeated sessions, distributed across time, with other material interleaved in between. If you want to make information stick, it's best to learn it, go away from it for a while, come back to it later, leave it behind again, and once again return to it - to engage with it deeply across time. Our memories naturally degrade, but each time you return to a memory, you reactivate its neural network and help to lock it in. One study found that students studying foreign language vocabulary can get just as good long-term retention from having learning sessions spaced out every two months as from having twice as many learning sessions spaced every two weeks. To put that another way: you can learn the same material in half the total time if you don't try to cram.

study finds reading electronically rather than on paper causes poorer reading retention and comprehension

UCLA researchers Oppenheimer and Mueller wondered if there was something about paper and the act of writing that explained this phenomenon, so they conducted an experiment. They asked about 50 students to attend a lecture. Half took notes on laptops and half with pen and paper. Both groups were then given a comprehension test. It wasn't even close. The students who used paper scored significantly higher than those who used laptops. Mueller attributes this unexpected finding - published in the journal, Psychological Science - to the fact that the "analog" note takers were forced to synthesize rather than merely transcribe. It's a phenomenon known as "desirable difficulty." "Desirable difficulty is some small roadblock that is in your path that actually improves your understanding of a topic," she explains.

"Chinese speakers can download nine numbers in two seconds, English speakers only seven. Dehaene thinks our brains scoop up information in two-second gulps, or loops, so the Chinese are regularly getting a number-retention advantage just because their number words are shorter."

"The reason that the unusual fonts are effective is that it causes us to think more deeply about the material," a co-author of the study, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton, wrote in an e-mail. "But we are capable of thinking deeply without being subjected to unusual fonts. Think of it this way, you can't skim material in a hard to read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully."

I wonder how this might relate to second language learning. When one doesn't know the words, even if the font is markedly legible, reading is slower and more difficult. One would expect comprehension and retention to be better, but I doubt that is the case. Interesting article. Must be why wedding invitations get put into Olde English or ornate script typefaces -- so that folks will read the names more carefully.

Ha!

Psychological research shows that jargon kills attention, comprehension, retention and motivation.

This article talks about how teenagers who are frequent texters also have poorer academic performance. Teenagers constantly check their phones, leading to less overall productivity, shorter attention spans, and less information retention.

Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of "Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy," reviews the research on how to retain learning and also read and study more effectively and efficiently.