Techniques to help you think excellently
Memory Techniques and Mnemonics
Techniques to help you think excellently
Memory Techniques and Mnemonics
http://www.psywww.com/mtsite/memory.html
Website Review Assignment
By
Brigitte Lépine
911975
Introduction
The purpose of this assignment is to "examine the quality of the proliferating on-line resources in the area of self-help, specifically memory aids and similar schemes." This paper evaluates one section of Mind Tools website, namely: Memory Techniques and Mnemonics located at http://www.psywww.com/mtsite/memory.html.
Selection
I searched for many sites before I actually decided to evaluate this one. In my search with Google I spent days trying to look for something of interest and that would also fit the criteria of memory and cognition. So after a while I had to make up my mind. I decided to go with the Mind Tools site as it appeared to fit the criteria for this assignment. In my search for a viable site I came across many mirror sites of the same information. For this assignment I chose the http://www.psywww.com/mtsite/memory.html site located in the United States because it appeared to be a more stable and complete version. In this assignment, I am looking specifically at the section Memory Techniques and Mnemonics which is a subsection of the Techniques to Help You Think Excellently section found on the Home page. The complete Mind Tools website is located at http://www.psywww.com/mtsite/index.html.
Here are other locations of the same information:
Site Content and Navigation
Memory Techniques and Mnemonics is a subsection of the bigger topic Techniques to Help You Think Excellently found on the home page. The Memory Techniques and Mnemonics page is divided in three sections:
The goal of this website is to improve the power of your memory. The first section contains articles to explain the fundamentals use of mnemonics. The second section provides information on many of the most effective memory techniques currently available. Finally, the third section provides strategies and applications for various fields. There is still a few links that are not working at this site, but they are minimal.
There's some navigation buttons at the top and bottom of each pages to get to the next or previous topic. You can get back to the Memory Techniques and Mnemonics page and also to the Mind Tools Home page at all times. Even though all navigations buttons are there I don't particularly like the presentation of the icons and their size for that matter, which I find too big and unappealing ...but they do the trick!
Following is a vision statement taken directly from the website:
Mind Tools Ltd's vision statement is: to enrich the quality of our customers lives by providing them with the tools to help them to use their minds more productively and effectively.
Validity and Reliability
The information in the site appears to be valid and reliable. The Memory Techniques have been drawn from the resources in this references page located at http://www.psywww.com/mtsite/referenc.html.
Mind Tools, is run by James Manktelow (online resume) and Graham Tarrant. James Manktelow has written the book Mind Tools, which was to be published by Kogan Page in late 1998. I did a search but haven not found it yet. I did however found the following information on his newer Mind Tools website located at http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/jnm.htm.
James Manktelow has run Mind Tools since it first went on-line in 1995. The concept for the site started with his research into the practical skills and techniques he needed to progress his own career - he found it frustrating that so many simple but important life and career skills were so poorly known.
The Mind Tools site exists to help correct this - since 1995, visitors have viewed more than 7 million Mind Tools pages. Many have been kind enough to send us very positive testimonials on how the techniques we have helped to popularise have helped them in their lives and their careers.
So, with all the mirror sites, its newer Mind Tools site and the academictips.org site, one can straightforwardly conclude that this information is valid and reliable. This information is also generally coherent with what Gredler (2001) says about information processing theory.
Intended Audience
As stated in the vision statement of the Mind Tools website, the audience is consider to be 'customers.' So, I assume that the age group would be young adult and up, for working people who want to increase their memory skills or have an interest in memory techniques and mnemonics. I find it's a good overview of the topic but frankly I found it a bit boring to read!
To differentiate the newer version, number-3-on-my-list, the audience targeted is definitively a working population that has money to buy books and resources advertised on the site. Notice how the sentence under the Mind Tools logo has changed. Now it is written: "Essential skills for an excellent career"! Before, it was written: "Helping you to think your way to an excellent life!"
The version number-4-of-my-list has a different audience too. It is focusing on College students. It's quite interesting to see the difference in the audiences for the exact same content (more or less with the newer site number-3-on-my-list).
My recommendation for people regarding this site will be toward version number-4-of-my-list, which is the site design by academictips.org located at http://www.academictips.org/memory/index.html. The context of this site is in better synch with students and teachers.
Relationship to Learning Theory
The Memory Techniques and Mnemonics webpages have to do with the cognitive perspective and the processing of information, as described in Gredler's textbook (2001), more specifically with the topic of encoding specific items into memory . "... mnemonic methods serve as organizing frameworks for the information to be learned." (p.185)
Bellezza (1996) as quoted in Gredler (2001) stated that to be effective as mental clues for information retrieval, mnemonic devices should meet these three following criteria:
-refers to the liability that the cue can be generated from memory at the time of recall as well as the time of learning.
-means that the mnemonic must be linked easily to the new information to be learned. Typically, visual images are more readily associated with new information to be learned.
-refers to the requirement that mnemonic devices must be dissimilar and easily identified as different. If they cannot be easily differentiated from each other, then more than one items of new information will become attached to basically the same cue. The result is confusion or forgetting. (Bellezza (1996) as quoted in Gredler (2001) p. 185)
The basic assumptions in the information-processing theory as stated by Gredler (2001) are that the "essentials components of learning are the organization of information to be learned, the learners' prior knowledge, and the processes involved in perceiving, comprehending, and storing information." (p. 170) This fit with the goal and the content of this site that is to improve the power of one's memory.
Conclusion
This was an interesting exercise. Before doing this exercise, I had been convinced that memorize information (memorization of facts) is a 'bad' practice to do in a classroom setting. Now, I understand better the rationale behind memorizing things. It is a strategy widely used with health students. They need to remember lots of abstract content. Mnemonics methods help them to remember the content. Gredler (2001) stated that it "is appropriate for arbitrary associations in different subject areas that must be learned." (p. 191) But as Bellezza (1996), quoted in Gredler (2001), stated, "to be effective, mnemonic techniques must be explained, demonstrated, and applied in many, many situations in which they are to be used. (p. 192).
For me, this makes memorizing not so bad a method. We all have heard that the brain is like a big muscle that needs exercise to remember things. However, the issue that I still need to explore here is one with the constructivist theory. With the little I know so far about constructivist, memorizing appear to have no place in the school system. I still feel the need to find out more about how constructivist can manage the same learning without the same methods or if there is actually a need for memorizing anything at all. I'm still confused with this. Hopefully, by the end of the course I will have an answer to this question.
Reference
Gredler, M. E. (2001). Learning and instruction: Theory into practice (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice Hall.