'Old teaching methods more suited for retaining'

Updated on: Monday, January 24, 2011

Although new trendy methods have emerged in the field learning, but London based researchers say that old-fashioned ways like reciting times-tables and verb conjugations are better.

As per their observation, they believe that reciting facts shortly after learning them is better than many new-style educational methods.

Recalling repeatedly seems to get things stored up easily in the memory for later use, the Telegraph reported, citing a study in the journal Science.

In recent days teachers depend heavily on learning techniques like concept or mind mapping to help students retain the most from the texts, the study said.

This involves drawing elaborate diagrams to represent relationship between words, ideas and tasks.

But two experiments, by Jeffrey Karpicke at Purdue University, Indiana, US, concluded that this was less effective than constant informal testing and reciting.

Karpicke asked around 100 college students to recall in writing, in no particular order, as much as they could from what they had just read from science material.

Recollecting-retrieval exercise actually worked much better to strengthen both short-term and long-term memory, than students expected to learn more from the mapping approach, the study said.

'Old teaching methods more suited for retaining'

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