I have heard of this method of remembering and memorizations before. A middle school history teacher told us about how he memorized his grocery list by placing the items on objects in his room or on the path he would take home each day. It allowed him to easily remember lists accurately and easily. The process did not really work for me on lists like he said but it definitely worked better this time around. It might be the developmental differences between middle school and now or the fact that there is much more interest in remembering goals instead of a grocery list. The connection to remembering goals is much high than a middle school student remembering a grocery list. Using familiar objects, rooms, or paths is a memory trick that many memory experts use to help boost their memory. It works because you are forcing a connection with something that you need to remember with something that you already know very well. This allows new connections to be made easily and stick around quicker and easier than just trying to remember the list.
This activity can be used to really help boost short-term memory. It can really help to remember lists of things that have no connection to anything and are important to get correct. It works well when you do not have any other means of copying down the list electronically or on paper. There is an episode of Brain Game the TV show that a memory expert learns the names of 15 or 20 people once before a tour and then recalls their names after the tour is over. He is able to make a connection with them by placing certain clues on their facial structure with something that is similar to their name. This is a similar memory technique as the one we are talking about. By using your special memory to help with information recall, it helps with all types of information recall.
Some minor changes were made from the feedback I received from my client. The biggest change was around the trial we had to run. We got the news that because of some things going on in the office, we could not run the modules through the office. We were going to have to run the modules with some police officers that the Assistant Criminal District Attorney knew and could ask for help. This gave us some people to use in a trial but not a wide disbursement of police officers that we would want if we were going to take this to the District Attorney as an option for training from their office. This caused us to have to use a learning management system that was a bit more scaled back that I would have liked and forced us to use a certain format since it was the only one available. We had to use Google Classroom and to make sure that we were respectful of the time of the police officers that were testing the module, we had to allow access to all of the activities. This is not the way the module was designed. We wanted to lock modules until the police officers were done and completed the activity and the instructor had provided quality feedback. The trial proved that this is an important step and the actual course would require this design piece to be in place to allow the training to be effective.
The Assistant Criminal District Attorney was very active in the discussion of the design of the course so there was not a lot of feedback to really change the final design. I was able to sit down and have a good discussion at the beginning of the project to get what they wanted to be the goal and how they wanted to approach the project. It helped that the Assistant Criminal District Attorney that I was working with had a background in education from a parent and a desire to become an educator before turning to the law as a profession. This allowed for a good discussion and a meeting that allowed for the design and expected outcomes to be set in the beginning and be followed during the entire design. I was also able to share each step to make sure I was on the correct track and was not really veering in a direction that was not desired for the training.
The peer feedback only gave a few minor tweaks that we could not do because of the change to learning management system. It was set around the idea that we were going to use some robust learning management system that was used by the county to deliver the learning. With the change that was made in the District Attorney’s office, those changes were not possible.
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