Information, concepts and skills need to be rehearsed if they are to be stored from short-term memory into long-term memory. Information will not be stored in long-term memory unless it is rehearsed. Two types of rehearsal include:

Rote rehearsal: Repeating things over and over again helps learners move information from working memory into long-term memory. This is a technique often used to memorize a poem or multiplication tables. Strategies for rote rehearsal include:

• Simple Repetition: For example, repeating a phone number over and over until icon be recalled in the correct sequence.

• Cumulative Repetition: For longer set of items, like a poem, the learner chunks the information and rehearses it a piece at a time. If you ever had to memorize a poem, you might have memorized the first stanza and then moved onto the next stanza, and then put the two together. You continue this sequence until the entire poem is memorized.

Elaborative rehearsal: This rehearsal strategy is used when information does not have to be remembered exactly the way that it was learned but it allows learners to understand new information more deeply. For example, students use rote rehearsal to remember the different types of government such as monarchy, dictatorship, and parliamentary. But if students want to understand why people die to change their type of government or make predictions about how governments will react in a crisis, then they require opportunities for elaborate rehearsal. Strategies for elaborate rehearsal include:

• Paraphrasing: Have students restate ideas in their own words, which then become more familiar cues for later storage. Using an auditory modality also helps learners attach sense.

• Selecting and Note-Taking: Students review texts and other information and determine which is most critical (using criteria from the teacher). The kinesthetic exercise of writing furthers retention.

• Questioning: After studying content, student generate questions ranging form simple recall to higher-order thinking of evaluation and synthesis. By designing questions, students engage in deeper cognition, make associations, and attach meaning.

• Summarizing: Students reflect on and summarize the important materials or skills learned in a lesson. This helps students make sense and attach meaning and is often done at the end of a lesson (closure).

Several of Marzano's strategies are also effective for elaborative rehearsal. For further reading, see Edutopia's article "Why Students Forget and What You Can Do About It."