It's great that you're back with Praxis trif, Evidenz dabei sind. Today we'll dive into the fascinating question of how we can code information so that it is not only available in the short term, but also in the long term. We want to understand how we can prevent that what we've learned from the first test to be lost again. Let's start with a fundamental distinction. Intentional versus incidental learning. Intentional learning is the classic case. You tell your students, learn the vocabulary, tomorrow we'll write a test. Here the intention is to learn something, quite clearly. Incidental learning, on the other hand, happens by chance. Think of a song that you hear over and over again in English. Suddenly you know the chorus by heart although you never consciously tried to learn it. Both of us are constantly in contact with each other in class. The exciting challenge is now what we can do so that the intended intentional learning does not cut off worse than the accidental. A central concept here is the processing depth. Simply put the faster the information is processed the faster they are forgotten again. Top-level processing often only means writing down reading through or marking passively without really thinking about it. A deep processing, on the other hand, means making meanings, connecting the new with existing knowledge finding your own examples or even discovering contradictions. Let's look at a few specific variants that you can use in class. First, elaboration. Encourage your students not only to explain that something is like that but also why it is like that. For example ask why chunking helps in memory work or how exactly the episodic difference from semantic memory differs. Second, self-explanation. Ask your students to think aloud. For example, I solve the task like this because ... Although it may cost a bit of time it is much more than just processing three additional exercises. Third, generating instead of recognizing again. It is more effective to let students find their own examples than to cross out only the previous examples. Filling in gaps in texts promotes a deeper processing than multiple choice questions because when generating, self-explanatory knowledge has to be called and processed. The second big keyword is the encoding specificity. Simply put the call for information works better when the learning and the call situation are similar. From the laboratory we know spectacular studies, where underwater words were also remembered better underwater than on land. Or when learned in a drunken state it is better to call in a drunken state which we should of course not follow in the classroom. Two important things can be derived from your teaching. First, you build up so-called cues for calling in detail. The more meaningful connections arise when learning the more connection points there are later for the call. Think of pictures stories donkey bridge gestures or structural aids like mind maps and tables. Also personal references are helpful. Where have you ever seen something like this in your everyday life? Second let your students practice the call not just the pure reading. We call this retrieval practice or the testing effect. Short, unnoted mini-tests, a one-minute paper at the end of the hour, where students write the most important thing in three sentences, or partner quizzing, where they ask each other questions. The research here is surprisingly clear. The recall is stronger than regular reading. Who only flies over often has a good feeling but this is often an illusion of competence. A third element is the state of learning. The mood, the activation level and tiredness play a role. Even if you can't control it completely you can theme it. Talk to your students about it. When do you learn the best experience-wise? How does over-tired learning feel? What is more useful to look at the notebook late at night or to start earlier and sleep enough for it? What does this mean in practice? In every hour you build up an active call even without direct pressure. You deliberately plan deep processing phases even if you do not have to do one or two additional tasks. You encourage your students to develop their own cues sketches notes or short stories. Finally, a small task for you. Look for a topic for your next hour for example long-term memory. Think about where you can build up elaboration. An idea would be to explain to your neighbor what the difference between episodic and semantic memory is, with each one example from your life. And how can you end up with a very short call? Maybe by writing three keywords on a card that you have picked up at the beginning of the next hour. With such measures you can really influence surface-to-surface learning. In the last episode of this series we will look at why learning despite all these measures sometimes seems to disappear and how you can deal with the topic of forgetting productively. Thank you for listening to Praxis trifft Evidenz.