What Connections Can We Draw Between Research on Long-Term Memory and Student Learning?

MIND, BRAIN, AND EDUCATION What Connections Can We Draw Between Research on Long-Term Memory and Student Learning? Yana Fandakova 1,2 and Silvia A. Bunge 1,3 INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE Who we are and how we interact with the world around us hinges on long-term memory, the ability to remember past events and experiences. The ability to remember the past improves rapidly in the ﬁrst years of life (e.g., Schneider & Pressley, 1997). As we grow up, we increasingly remember more details about when or where something happened, and become more sophisticated at using diﬀerent strategies to facilitate learning and remembering (e.g., Schneider & Pressley, 1997). Many memories are created in school: we can often clearly picture encounters with our teachers and classmates or school ﬁeld trips that we went to. At the same time, memory is critical for success in school, supporting language comprehension (e.g., Kutas & Federmeier, 2000) and reading (e.g., Blankenship, O’Neill, Ross, & Bell, 2015; Mirandola, Del Prete, Ghetti, & Cornoldi, 2011) as well as arithmetics (e.g., Blankenship et al., 2015; Qin et al., 2014). Despite the centrality of memory for academic attain- ment, there have been few attempts to specify the key mech- anisms by which children harness their developing memory systems to learn in school. There is a rich body of litera- ture in psychology and neuroscience on the mechanisms that underlie various forms of memory and their development, but there have been few attempts to draw links between this well controlled, mechanistically detailed research and the richer, more complex world of classroom instruction. 1 Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California at Berke- ley 2 Center for Mind and Brain, University of California at Davis 3 Department of Psychology, University of California at Berkeley Address correspondence to Yana Fandakova, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA; e-mail: fandakova@berkeley.edu, or to Silvia A. Bunge, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA; e-mail: sbunge@berkeley.edu. Volume 10—Number 3 Indeed, it is diﬃcult to directly apply this basic research to the classroom (e.g., Ofen, Yu, & Chen, 2016). By com- parison, laboratory-based research on executive functions and motivation has provided important insights that are shaping educational practices (e.g., Blair, 2016; Diamond & Lee, 2011; Raghubar, Barnes, & Hecht, 2010). Here, we attempt to redress this imbalance by highlighting the work of researchers who study memory with a view to informing educational practices. Many fascinating questions in this arena are ripe for exploration. What do educators, parents, and children need to know about diﬀerent forms of memory, and when and how they develop? How do diﬀerent memory systems interact during learning? How do children build on—or override—their prior knowledge? Why is active learning so beneﬁcial? What role does future thinking play in a stu- dent’s self-concept and motivation? Why do some children struggle to remember what they have learned, and what can be done to improve their mnemonic abilities? Does physical activity promote academic achievement, and if so, how? This special issue includes empirical and review arti- cles that begin to address these and other questions. The articles provide an overview of the ongoing research on learning and memory in childhood and beyond, and outline potential connections among laboratory-based research on memory functioning, development, and educational prac- tice. Figure 1 outlines the connections among key themes explored in these articles. A taxonomy of memory will be helpful for readers who are new to this area (see Squire, 2004 for a more detailed overview). Long-term memory, a term used to refer to mem- ory traces that last for days, months, or years, is comprised of diﬀerent systems associated with distinct biological sub- strates. Forms of long-term memory include habits and pro- cedural skills such as riding a bicycle or playing the piano, © 2016 International Mind, Brain, and Education Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.