Marge and success

Marge or rather MARGE has perked her head up again on Twitter. Arthur Shimamura’s acronym for five principles of efficient learning: Motivate, Attend, Relate, Generate, Evaluate. The MARGE mnemonic techniques puts forward “A Whole-Brain Learning Approach for Students and Teachers” to improve student learning.

That led to an online conversation on Motivation. As presented by MARGE, the trick to motivation is to expand the spectrum of pleasure-seeking experiences and push ourselves into new learning situations. Shimamura highlights the constructed and crafted sparks of personal anecdote, museum-like demonstration, questions that address the big picture, storytelling and multimedia. Whilst I see value in MARGE – Shimamura’s motivation is perhaps a sticking point.

The tweeted something to the effect that, the more I teach with RememberMore, the more I see confidence and success underpinning motivation. Almost to the lesson, in every new introduction and reintroduction of Successive Relearning the “success-motivation-success” cycle kicks in and learner confidence accelerates.

Now with fourteen iterative experiences under my belt, I can almost define that pattern, to the lesson. The lessons overlap as although the pattern is the same, the speed of adoption varies from class to class.

• “Effort with little reward” (0-8)
• “Effort with some reward” (6-15)*
• “New learning” or knowledge starts to surface in lessons and oracy starts to deepen classroom discussion (10-15)*
• Finally, this knowledge transfers to written contributions (16+). In core subjects that is typically week four.

The overlap occurs, as different groups respond unique. Where learners have high success rates this significantly accelerates the Review. Especially when using ⤵️ Reorder. Second, the content maybe different and third the spacing variable across subjects. Core subjects with high frequency tend to benefit.*

The more content we retrieved, the most success the learners experienced, the more confident the learner became – the more the learners wanted to practice. Add the RememberMore App – learning efficiency rates have been accelerated.

A short discussion on MARGE and my experiences of RememberMore led to me borrowing two phrases from Caroline Spalding, @MrsSpalding.

The impact of achievement on self-concept is greater than the impact of self-concept on achievement.

Daniel Muijus (c/o Caroline Spalding)

Lack of motivation is a logical response to repeated failure.

White and Rose at Ambition, I think! -Caroline Spalding

These two observations, ring ever louder in my ears teaching mixed prior attainment English classes and Alternative Provision. With evidence from the app, we hope to be able to empirically support or refute this teachers gut feeling.