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May 2020 | Volume 77 | Number 8 Learning and the Brain Pages 76-81
Pooja K. Agarwal
Research in cognitive psychology shows that getting students to pull information from their memory is key to long-term transfer.
When I was getting certified in elementary education during college, I distinctly remember being terrified about having to develop and teach a two-week-long history unit on Christopher Columbus in a 5th grade classroom. I hated history. In my experience, history was simply the memorization of names, dates, and facts that I didn't much care for. As a student teacher, I literally cried in my undergraduate methods course. How could I teach a subject I despised?
In retrospect, I don't think I taught the unit very well. I remember presenting the original log from Christopher Columbus's journey, and having students compare it to the edited version in their social studies textbook. I gave a few lectures on the exploration and discovery of the "new world," I created worksheets (we all love those, right?), brought in a guest speaker who portrayed Queen Isabella in costume, and ended the unit with recaps and reviews of what students learned.
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