Mnemonic Text‐processing Strategies: A Teaching Science for Science Teaching

This article reports on the development and evaluation of a two‐component mnemonic strategy for teaching botany concepts. One component, a pictorial “mnemonomy”, was targeted at learning a hierarchically organized plant‐classification system; and the second component, based on the mnemonic “keyword” method, was targeted at learning the specific defining characteristics of the various plant groups. It was hypothesized that this dual mnemonic approach would be more useful than the usual figural‐taxonomy approach in allowing college students to acquire both higher‐order structural and lower‐order detail information‐‐the “forest” andthe “trees”, as it were. The research results strongly support the hypothesis. Especially important to this conclusion was the finding that relative to traditional instruction, mnemonic instruction facilitated: (1) the acquisition of both classification and characteristic information; and (2) inferential thinking on a transfer (problem‐solving) task that required novel manipulations of the learned concepts. Performance gains associated with the mnemonic condition were long‐term, still being manifested on delayed‐test measures. A number of theoretical and educational implications of the research are considered