Memory in Elementary School Children Is Improved by an Unrelated Novel Experience

Memory in Elementary School Children Is Improved by an Unrelated Novel Experience

Abstract

Education is the most traditional means with formative effect on the human mind, learning and memory being its fundamental support. For this reason, it is essential to find different strategies to improve the studentś performance. Based on previous work, we hypothesized that a novel experience could exert an enhancing effect on learning and memory within the school environment. Here we show that novel experience improved the memory of literary or graphical activities when it is close to these learning sessions. We found memory improvements in groups of students who had experienced a novel science lesson 1 hour before or after the reading of a story, but not when these events were 4 hours apart. Such promoting effect on long-term memory (LTM) was also reproduced with another type of novelty (a music lesson) and also after another type of learning task (a visual memory). Interestingly, when the lesson was familiar, it failed to enhance the memory of the other task. Our results show that educationally relevant novel events experienced during normal school hours can improve LTM for tasks/activities learned during regular school lessons. This effect is restricted to a critical time window around learning and is particularly dependent on the novel nature of the associated experience. These findings provide a tool that could be easily transferred to the classroom by the incorporation of educationally novel events in the school schedule as an extrinsic adjuvant of other information acquired some time before or after it. This approach could be a helpful tool for the consolidation of certain types of topics that generally demand a great effort from the children.

Materials and Methods

Students

1676 Participants (ages 7 to 9 years-old) from 8 different schools in Buenos Aires, Argentina were tested. Characteristics of the institutions and the students intervening in the experiments are shown in table S1. All students were naïve to the procedures.

Novel lessons

In this work we considered it to be a novel activity if the class/lesson (science or music) complied with these requirements:

1. The whole group of students was unexpectedly taken from its classroom and led to a different place to attend a lesson that was not previously informed about until it started.
2. This novel lesson was given in a place inside the school but not usually frequented by the students for their lessons, e.g., common room, laboratory, patio, hall.
3. The lesson was given by a skilled teacher unknown to the students.
4. It is a short activity (20 min) never experienced before by the students, with novel contents appropriate for their age.
5. Students are encouraged to actively participate and be attentive at all times. When the activity finishes, they return to their habitual classroom.

The novel science class was based on simple experiments aiming to the constant participation of the students and their full interaction with the elements. In the first years at school it is extremely infrequent to experience this kind of empirical science lessons. In the class, students were introduced to some basic physics and biology principles such as density, gravity, superficial tension and electrostatics) with playful activities. The novel science lesson was specially designed and given by the researchers. Besides, the novel music class was planned and dictated by the music therapist aiming to resemble those novel features of the science class. Likewise, students were not informed of this class until its start and were involved in its activities. Considering that students habitually have music lessons in their schools (as it is a compulsory subject), the novel music lesson was based on innovative teaching methods and it also dealt with topics highly infrequent for the students. The lesson consisted of games with homemade instruments (like rods, x-ray films, buckets and balls) and it was intended to show that music could even be made with simple elements and yet they could also form an orchestra with those atypical instruments.

Familiar lesson

The same music lesson described above was presented for 2 weeks (one lesson each week) and in the third week this “familiar lesson” was associated with a short story read 1 hour before the music lesson. The following day, long-term memory for the story was tested.