As a series continues, our brains have to process groups of items, making the subsequent items harder to remember. Items at the beginning of a series are stored in our long-term memory more easily because it takes less processing power for our brains to remember single items. The primacy effect describes our tendency to better remember information at the beginning of a series. The serial position effect is caused by two other memory recall biases called the primacy effect and the recency effect. Important information should be presented at the beginning and end of a class, presentation or lesson, in order to give people the best chance at remembering the most important aspects. Teachers need to plan learning sessions that take advantage of the primacy effect and the recency effect, because cognitive memory biases are hard to overcome even if students are aware of them.
This makes awareness of the serial position effect vital for effective teaching. Teachers often have to try and squeeze large amounts of information in just a few classes and hope that their students are absorbing the information. This begins all the way in childhood, when teachers plan their classes. It is usually up to people in leadership positions to decide how to present important information.
Without knowledge of how we best remember information, we may use tactics such as repeating a list in the same order again and again, believing that repetition is enough for information to be committed to memory.Īlthough individually, we can use tactics that try to counter the ways in which the serial position effect causes us to forget items in the middle of a series, we are often not able to control how information is presented to us. We need to be aware of how our memory works in order to organize information in a manner that is most optimal for recall. The serial position effect means that your memory is hindered for information that is presented in the middle of a series. As you go to write down the last sentence he spoke, you realize you only remember the first few words and the last few words, but not the whole sentence.
You want to write down the definitions, but he is speaking quite quickly. However, what happens when we need to remember information that we only briefly encounter? For example, imagine you are in a lecture, and your professor is explaining some important definitions. Not being able to remember all of the items on our grocery list may not be the end of the world, because we can easily write down what food we need to buy so that we can reference it again, instead of relying on our memory.
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