Republic of Mathematics blog

Posts Tagged ‘instructional design

What math teachers should know about memory, 2: working memory

Posted by: Gary Ernest Davis on: April 21, 2011

Mathematics teachers commonly complain that their students do not memorize facts, definitions  and formulas. In a previous post I described Hermann Ebbinghaus’s experiments on rote memorization, and his finding that memorization of nonsense syllables decays exponentially. What we teachers of mathematics want is for students to recall, at least for the very next class, what […]