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College undergraduates were asked to study a hierarchical plant classification system according to one of two provided organizational strategies: (a) afigural taxonomy, which consisted of labeled boxes and connecting lines to represent, respectively, the nodes and links of the hierarchy; (b) a pictorial mnemonomy, in which the unfamiliar plant terms were recoded into more familiar concepts, which were then thematically related to other terms on the same branch of the hierarchy. Mnemonomy students outperformed taxonomy students on (a) both immediate and 5-day delayed measures of classification system construction and use; and (b) a test that required solving analogies involving the plant terms, thereby adding to recent evidence that mnemonic strategies can facilitate performance on tasks that require some degree of higher-order thinking. The locus of mnemonic facilitation was found to reside in the more meaningful links afforded by the mnemonomy. Such performance data, along with favorable student self-reports, support the educational utility of scientific mnemonomies.
Levin et al. (Fri,) studied this question.