Did you know that after just one hour of being presented with some information, the average person will forget 50 percent of what they've just learnt? After 24 hours, you would have most likely forgotten 70 percent, and by one week, you will not be able to recall 90 percent of that information. (Kohn, 2014).

Every single school day, students are exposed to enormous amounts of information and there are certain facts, data and concepts that you are expected to apply to your everyday learning. In this article, the researcher looks at different mnemonic devices to may help students remember facts and information better. The researcher also looks at how the brain develops, how it remembers and forgets, and the factors that affect memory retention, specifically for students between ages 11 to 14.

How do we remember and forget things?

Memories are stored in different parts of your brain, whether these are of events that you have experienced or facts and information that you remember.

According to study by the University of Queensland, there are three main areas in the brain that help to remember. They are called the hippocampus, neocortex, and amygdala. These brain regions are involved in explicit memory, which is the area we will concentrate on because it involves motor skills, remembering details, and information retention.

The hippocampus is where semantic and episodic memories are formed in the frontal lobe of the brain. The hippocampus plays a very important role in our brains as one of the main components of humans’ long-term memory abilities. Long-term memory is when a person has the ability to recall information from a few days to a few years ago, and the hippocampus is where it all starts.

Next is the neocortex, which is located in the cerebral cortex and has other functions like sensory perception, reasoning, and language skills. How these two parts of the brain connect is that the information and memories that are stored in the hippocampus can be moved to the neocortex and be there as general knowledge and the ability to recall memories and facts without thinking about it. Lastly, the amygdala which adds an emotional aspect to these memories which makes these memories harder to forget if they involve strong emotions. The interactions between the hippocampus, neocortex, and amygdala help retain your memories and keep them consistent with the events that happened.

Even with all of these memory strategies to help us retain information, sometimes we will forget things, and according to thepsycologistworld.com, in simple terms, there are three main ways that we forget:

1. Decay - When you don't practice the info you want to remember or don't think about it.

2. Displacement - You form new memories and some of your old ones get replaced.

3. Interference - It is too difficult to recall information because old memories are interfering or when new memories disfigure old ones.

Using mnemonic devices and knowing which one is the most useful could become very important for students to know and help them remember important information. Students also have to remember a lot of facts and concepts while they are learning in school, this could be very helpful to them during this time and also if they needed to use it in the future.

A student in Grade 11 at Hong Kong International School says that she uses memory palace in her studies to remember diagrams, science processes and cell structures to help her better visualize and understand what she is learning. This research on memory retention and how it works matters because it informs others what memory techniques they should or could use and why it is beneficial based on previous research.

When children are between 11 to 14 years old, they begin to develop new skills like logical thinking, reasoning skills and making inferences. This is a time when subjects in school become more challenging, and the brain grows and develops in such a way that the young person is more capable of thinking about abstract concepts and have a more strategic approach to problems.

This ability to think more strategically gives one an advantage when learning new memory strategies and y also be able to use them more effectively unlike when you are younger.

What are some memory techniques and how do they work?

There are a few techniques that researchers, students and winners of memorization contests use and recommend when trying to remember large amounts of information:

Memory Palace

How the memory palace technique works is that you are basically trying to associate a familiar place with what you want to remember. You will create a mental image of the place you are familiar with, like your house. This will become your memory palace. If you are trying to remember a list of things you need to buy for instance, you will associate the different things on the list with the objects in your memory palace.

The Peg System

The peg system works by making a list of things that you already know and connecting it to the list or information that you want to remember. An example of this would be to first, take something simple you know and connect it with a rhyming word. Like counting from 1 - 10. If you start with one you can rhyme it with sun and with two, bamboo and so on. After you make this list, you can connect it with what you want to remember. If you wanted to remember a grocery list, you would link the item with something you associate the numbers with and make an image of it in your head to make the items harder to forget.

Acronyms

By using acronyms, you would create a word or phrase where the first letter or each letter would be a word that you wanted to remember. An example of this would be PEMDAS (please excuse my dear aunt sally), which is a commonly used acronym to help remember the order in which you solve a math problem.

The Experiment

In this experiment, students were asked to remember different kinds of lists over the course of 2 weeks and students had one to two days to remember their lists using a memory strategy.

The students were asked to remember a grocery list, out of 20, how many digits of pi they could remember, 15 bones in the human body and the first 36 elements in the periodic table.

There were four seventh grade students that participated in this experiment. There were 3 girls, ages 12 and 13, and one boy aged 12. Each person was assigned a specific memory technique– memory palace, the peg system, acronyms, except for one who was asked just to remember the best he could and acted as the control.

List 1: Students were asked to memorize a 15-item grocery list. The student who did the best in this List was student one with a memory palace remembering 87% of the content. Student number two with the peg system strategy was the second best remembering 73% of the material. The student who was last was student three with acronyms.

List 2: In list number two, students tried to memorize the first 20 digits of Pi. In this list, S2 did the best remembering 60% of it while S1 remembered 50%. S3 remembered 25% and the control, S4 memorized 35%.

List 3: In this list students were asked to memorize 15 different bones in the body. S1 did the best in this list remembering 67% of the material while S2 remembered 53% of the bones. The control in this situation was the least successful in this test remembering only 33% while the acronym student remembered 40%.

List 4: In the last list, this was a text to see, out of the first 30 elements in the periodic table, how many could they remember. S1 with memory palace did the best in this last test remembering 42 percent of the elements. S2 remembered 19%, S3 remembered 14% and S4 remembered 17%.