PSYCHOLOGY

MENTAL DEVELOPMENT

MENTAL DEVELOPMENT

• In the educational process, improving the skill of remembering and coming out of the forgetting problem and adjusting to various conditions is called as mental development.

THEORIES OF MENTAL DEVELOPMENT

• There are three theories of remembering and forgetting.

• They are:

•       Theory of Decay or Disease,

•      Theory of Interference,

• Theory of Trace Change.

THEORY OF DECAY• Theory of Decay states that impressions

created in the brain during the learning process fade away with the passage of time. This is also called as forgetting.

THEORY OF INTERFERENCE• Theory of Interference states that the

interference and interaction of the ever-lasting memory of motor skills cause the spontaneous recovery of the memory in case of forgetting.

THEORY OF TRACE CHANGE• Theory of Trace Change states that one’s memory of what

he has seen tends to change from general to specific ways. For ex. After learning the alphabets if a child is shown a triangle, he relates it immediately to the alphabet “A”.

• Tip of Tongue approach states that forgetting is only a temporary and not a permanent failure of the mechanism responsible for remembering.

METHODS TO MEASURE MEMORY

• Psychologists generally describe three methods to measure memory.

• They are :

• Recall

• Recognisation

• Re-learning

RECALL

• It is a very simple method to measure. • Expose children to some words for a specific

period of time and then ask them to recall as many times as possible.

RECOGNISATION• It is the discrimination between the seen and the

unseen.• Multiple choice questions are examples of a typical

recognisation experiment.• The student is shown a number of items that he has

studied along with some new items and asked to recognize the studied items

RE-LEARNING• The student is asked to

re-learn the material at a later stage instead of recalling and recognizing.

• The difference between the number of trials required to re-learn is then considered as an index of retention.

• This is often referred to as measure saving score

LEARNING METHODS

METHODS FOR RETENTION OF LEARNT SUBJECT

• over learning,• meaningful organisation

of subject matter,• use of meaningful

material,• self recitation,• formation of clear

concept,• use of the principle of

learning by doing.

TYPES OF MEMORY

• Short term memory,

• Long term memory.

SHORT TERM MEMORY

LONG TERM MEMORY