From the Assistant Principal Teaching and Learning

Surface Learning Aquisition and Consolidation Strategies

Inquiry learning is of fundamental importance at St Andrews across all curricular areas. 

Surface knowledge is an essential phase in inquiry learning, and imperative for learning. Students need to acquire and consolidate surface level knowledge before being able to progress to deep and transfer levels of learning.

Surface strategies are important across all year levels and should be used throughout the year.

The following strategies maybe used in the classroom and whilst undertaking home learning. 

INTEGRATE WITH PRIOR KNOWLEDGE

• One of the best ways to acquire and store new knowledge is to link it to existing knowledge. 
  
  

MNEMONICS 

• This is a general word that relates to any memory device. It is often used to learn new content when there is no logical way to remember it.
• One common mnemonic is keyword mnemonics, where you use words or mental images to remember important information. This is when you select a word you know and associate it to a word you are trying to learn, creating a mental picture to relate them. This works in most subject areas and is particularly useful in teaching languages.

PLANNING AND PREDICTION

• This involves an explicit focus on students determining how they are going to perform and specifically thinking about what they will need to do to perform well. By predicting and planning, students need to begin thinking about the criteria that will mark their success and where they sit in relation to their goal

NOTE-TAKING

• Surface phase - note-taking focuses on finding key ideas in a text. 
• Transfer phase - using note-taking to organise and transform information

IMAGERY

• Taking notes through images provides opportunities to add a visual image to support learning new material. 

HIGHLIGHTING/UNDERLINING

• A common strategy of students, highlighting/underlining is useful for focusing on main ideas and important parts of the text, but only if it leads to further investigation of the text—particularly the relationships and connection of the main ideas.

SUMMARISATION 

• Students write summaries of texts to be learned in order to capture the main points and exclude unimportant or repetitive material. It involves paraphrasing the most important ideas
• It has the highest impact when used for surface acquisition at the beginning of the learning, where students are looking for high-level meaning, or the “gist” of the text, rather than for evaluation and synthesis questions 

OUTLINING/TRANSFORMING

• This technique involves the rearrangement of material, such as making an outline before writing an essay, as it provides opportunities for the learner to see the whole or big picture of what they are learning as they are learning it.