Mnemonics in Education: Current Research and Applications

Mnemonic techniques are a powerful way to learn large amounts of information, but are not used widely in education today. Why is this? One reason is that the practical demands of the classroom may not be conducive to the use of mnemonics. This review explores how students actually use mnemonics and examines 4 questions about using mnemonics in education: (a) Do mnemonics contribute to more than just rote memory? (b) Do mnemonics work with educationally relevant materials? (c) How much time is required to learn and prepare a mnemonic? (d) Do mnemonics promote long-term learning? With these considerations, the usefulness of mnemonics in the classroom may be limited to certain contexts. However, I provide a few alternative approaches for considering the use of mnemonics in educational settings, such as combining them with other learning techniques and treating mnemonics as a retrieval aid rather than a core learning strategy.