WELL-BEING
LEARNING
What are Mnemonics? By Lisa Cody-Sehmar, Learning Support Teacher Year 4
M
nemonics are any learning techniques which aid information retention or retrieval in the human memory. The term mnemonics comes from the word “mnemon” meaning mindful. The ancient Greeks developed basic principles of mnemonics over one thousand years ago which we have adapted and continue to use today. We have all probably used mnemonics before, without even realising so. There are many different types of mnemonic devices which can be categorised into four main types – Acronyms and Acrostics, Rhymes and Songs, Imagery and Visualisations and lastly, Chunking.
“Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain” is an acrostic mnemonic which takes the first letter of each colour to make a new, memorable sentence. Rhymes and Songs These are acoustic encoding mnemonics which make concepts or rules easier to remember. A common rhyming mnemonic many of us know and use is “i before c, except after c” when spelling words containing the consecutive letters i and e, such as in thief and shield or receive and ceiling.
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• Bangkok Patana School
Chunking
Imagery and Visualisations
Acronyms and Acrostics An acronym is a word (or words) formed by using the first letter(s) of the item you wish to remember. For example, the acronym “Roy G Biv” is useful when remembering the colours of the rainbow – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Alternatively,
the image of the sun burning the sole of one’s foot may be a helpful tool for some learners. The Method of Loci (also known as The Journey Method) is a mnemonic device also based on imagery and visualisation. For this method, one chooses a familiar location (home or journey to school) and mentally “places” desired objects one wishes to remember around this familiar setting. These things can then be later recalled by simply mentally walking around that location.
Translating words you wish to remember into mental images can be a useful mnemonic device for many because our brains remember images more readily than words. This is especially beneficial for those learning a new language. For example, the Spanish word for sun is sol, so forming
Because our brains can only process so much information at a time, the mnemonic device of chunking breaks down larger pieces of information into smaller, more memorable chunks. This is especially true for telephone numbers. Unquestionably, 081-745-281 is easier to recall and repeat than 081745281.
