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Explain It To Me: The Beneficial Effects of Explaining for Memory
Outcomes of the Experiment
Lachner and colleagues (1) created an experiment (Experiment 2) in which they tested these different hypotheses against each other. They had students study two related texts and asked them to either a) explain the main ideas to a fictitious person or b) write down everything they remember (written retrieval practice). In addition, they had students engage with either of these activities between reading the two texts or after reading both texts (in-between versus after-study conditions).
They found that students performed best in the ‘in-between explaining’ condition, followed by the ‘in-between retrieval practice’ condition, followed by the ‘after-study explaining’ condition, and followed by the ‘after-study retrieval practice’ condition. Thus, engaging in any of the two study activities between two texts proved to be very beneficial. Furthermore, explaining outperformed retrieval practice, which indicates that explaining, indeed, seems to engage different, and conducive processes for knowledge build-up and maintenance compared to retrieval practice alone.
Interestingly, the authors conducted another experiment (Experiment 1) in which they had students do oral retrieval of the main ideas. In that experiment, they did not find a difference between explaining and retrieval practice. Thus, there seems to be something about ‘thinking aloud’ that triggers organizational processes for knowledge acquisition. Retrieval practice in itself – as we have seen in the first experiment presented here – is not the decisive driving factor, but something about ‘social presence’ and the associated deeper organization of knowledge that takes place when we explain ideas to someone else seems to hold the key of the effects revealed in their study.
Unit 1: Teach Narrative Writing With The New York Times
Welcome to our first writing unit of the school year. Below you’ll find a detailed description of each element, as well as ways to put them together to make your own custom writing unit. To learn more about other writing units, visit our writing curriculum overview.
Stories can thrill, wound, delight, uplift and teach. Telling a story vividly and powerfully is a vital skill that is deeply valued across all cultures, past and present — and narrative writing is, of course, a key genre for literacy instruction at every level.
When your students think “New York Times,” they probably think of our 168-year history of award-winning journalism, and may not even realize that The Times today is full of personal narratives — on love and family, but also on how we relate to animals, live with disabilities or navigate anxiety. If you flip or scroll through sections of the paper, you’ll see that personal writing is everywhere, and often ranks among the most popular pieces The Times publishes each week.
At The Learning Network, we’ve been posting writing prompts every school day for over a decade now, and many of them invite personal narrative. Inspired by Times articles of all kinds, the prompts ask students to tell us about their passions and their regrets, their most embarrassing moments and their greatest achievements. Thousands of students around the world respond each month, and each week during the school year we call out our favorite responses.
This fall, we’re taking it a step further and turning our narrative-writing opportunities into a contest that invites students to tell their own stories. To support it, we’re also starting a new series called “Mentor Texts,” which spotlights great Times models and helps demystify the personal essay and other writing genres for learners.
In this unit, we’re putting it all together. You won’t find a pacing calendar or daily lesson plans, but you will find plenty of ideas and resources to get your students reading, writing and thinking about their own stories, including:
✔ New narrative-writing prompts every week.
✔ Daily opportunities for students to have an authentic audience for their writing via posting comments to our forums.
✔ Guided practice with mentor texts that include writing exercises.
✔ A clear, achievable end-product (our contest) modeled on real-world writing.
✔ The chance for students to have their work published in The New York Times.
Here’s how it works.
Start with personal-narrative prompts for low-stakes writing.
We publish a variety of prompts every week that encourage narrative writing and related skills, and we invite students to respond to them on our site. Each is drawn from a student-friendly article or image that has published in The Times, and links back to those pieces. All are open for comment by students 13 and up, and every comment is read by Times editors before it is approved.
We publish two types of prompts:
1. Student Opinion Questions
These prompts invite students to read a Times article and then respond to questions that help them think about how it applies to their own lives, like these:
“Do You Hold Grudges?”
“Do You Consider Your Siblings Friends?”
“Have You Ever Been Ghosted?”
You can access them all, added as they publish, here. Or, check out our collections of 650 and 1225 prompts that are organized into categories like family, school, personality and childhood memories.
2. Picture Prompts
These accessible, image-driven prompts inspire a variety of kinds of writing. Many invite students to write about experiences from their own lives, like “Dog in a Backpack,” which asks: What are the weirdest, most interesting or most surprising things you’ve seen on public transportation?
You can find all our Picture Prompts, added as they publish, here.
At the end of each school year, we round them all up and categorize them by genre of writing. Take a look at our collections from 2016-17, 2017-18 and 2018-19, and scroll down to look for the categories like “What Story Could This Image Tell?” and “Share Experiences From Your Own Life” to find many prompts that can inspire narratives.
Ideas for Using Our Prompts to Teach Narrative Writing
Teachers tell us that they use these prompts in their classrooms in a variety of ways, whether to practice writing, spark discussion or inspire lessons. Here are a few suggestions for how you might weave them into a narrative writing unit:
Help students develop a daily writing habit by using prompts as warm-up activities at the start of class. Students can share their work in pairs or small groups.
Assign them as homework. Many teachers invite their students to scroll through what we’ve offered on any given week and choose their favorite prompt to respond to.
The comments section can offer a “rehearsal space” to practice honing voice, trying new techniques and writing for a real audience. Every week, Times editors select the student comments that do these things particularly well to be featured in our roundup of our favorite comments.
If students are writing formal personal narrative essays, whether for our contest or not, our prompts might serve as inspiration to help them find topics.
For even more ideas, check out our free, on-demand webinar, which features guest teachers discussing how they use our thousands of writing prompts for everyday low-stakes writing practice.
Read mentor texts and try some of the “writer’s moves” we spotlight.
The Times is full of wonderful writing that can serve as mentor texts for helping students look at the various elements of the genre and think about how to weave specific craft moves into their own writing.
We have broken narrative writing into several key elements and spotlighted a mentor text that does a particularly good job at each. Here are the six we will be starting with, each aligned with criteria from our contest rubric (see below). We will link to them here as they publish in September.
Tell a story about a small but memorable event or moment in your life.
Use details to show, not tell.
Write from your own point of view, in your real voice.
Use dialogue effectively.
Tell a complete story, with a true narrative arc.
Reflect on the experience and give the reader a take-away.
After students read each text and focus on a specific technique, we invite them to “Now Try This” via an exercise that helps them practice that element. Then, we provide additional mentor text examples, as well as a list of questions to consider while reading any of them. The goal is to demystify what good writing looks like, and encourage students to practice concrete exercises to use those techniques.
Enter our Personal Narrative Essay Contest.
At this point in the unit, your students will have practiced writing about their lives using our many prompts. They will also have read several mentor texts, and practiced elements of personal writing with each one. Now, we hope, they can produce one polished piece of writing that brings it all together.
This contest invites students to submit a “short, powerful story about a meaningful life experience.” Beyond a caution to write no more than 600 words, it will be fairly open-ended. We’re not asking students to write to a particular theme or use a specific structure or style; instead, we encourage them to experiment and produce something that they feel represents their real voice, telling a tale that matters to them.
All student work will be read by Times editors or journalists and/or by educators from around the country. Winners will have their work published on our site and, perhaps, in the print New York Times.
Visit our 2019-20 Student Contest Calendar for more information.
Related: Our “Show Us Your Generation” Photo Contest
In the fall of 2018, we ran our first-ever photo contest for teenagers, and we were dazzled by what we received. Here’s how we introduced the challenge:
What stereotypes about teenagers do the adults you know seem to hold? How does the media portray people your age — whether you’re called Gen Z, iGen or anything else?
What can you show us from your own life, or the lives of those around you, that might help make that portrait more interesting, nuanced, complete or real?
In this contest we invite teenagers to take photographs that depict some aspect of teenage life that you think may be misunderstood, ignored or largely unknown, and, in a short artist’s statement, tell us why. We hope to be able to use some of the winning work in the print Learning section that will come out in early November.
We will be running that same contest again, concurrently with our personal narrative contest. While the two have somewhat different prompts, we see both as invitations for students to explore issues of identity and voice. Teachers focusing on narrative writing may want to bring in photography as a multimedia addition, either in their own classrooms, or via collaborating with art-department colleagues.
You can find all the details here.
Teach Writing With The New York Times: A Free School-Year Curriculum in 7 Units
The New York Times publishes more than 1,400 articles and Opinion pieces every week, on topics ranging from science to sports, politics to pop culture, foreign affairs to food and fashion. They’re written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists here at The Times, but also by outside contributors, from authors like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, statesmen like President Barack Obama and artists like Meek Mill and Angelina Jolie.
How can teachers take this incredible breadth of material and use it with their students? Our mission at the Learning Network for over two decades has been to help you do just that. But this year, we’re taking that mission a bit further.
The writing curriculum detailed below is both a road map for teachers and an invitation to students. For teachers, we’ve pulled together the many writing-related features we already offer, added new ones, and organized them all into seven distinct units. Each focuses on a different genre of writing that you can find not just in The Times but also in all kinds of real-world sources both in print and online.
But our main goal is to offer young people a global audience — to, in effect, invite them to add their voices to the larger conversation at The Times about issues facing our world today. Through the opportunities for publication woven throughout each unit, we hope to encourage students to go beyond simply being media consumers to become media creators themselves.
So have a look, and see if you can find a way to include any of these opportunities in your curriculum this year, whether to help students tell stories, express opinions, investigate ideas, analyze art or make connections. We can’t wait to hear what your students have to say!
Each unit includes:
Writing prompts to help students try out related skills.
We publish two writing prompts every school day, and we also have thematic collections of more than 1,000 prompts published in the past. Your students might consider responding to these prompts on our site and using our public forums as a kind of “rehearsal space” for practicing voice and technique.
Daily opportunities to practice writing for an authentic audience.
If a student submits a comment on our site, it will be read by Times editors, who approve each one before it gets published. Submitting a comment also gives students an audience of fellow teenagers from around the world who might read and respond to their work. Each week, we call out our favorite comments and honor dozens of students by name in our Thursday “Current Events Conversation” feature.
Guided practice with mentor texts.
Each unit we publish will be accompanied by Times models of the genre. And each mentor text we showcase will include short exercises that spotlight an element of the genre, show students how it works, and invite them to practice that same move in their own work.
Teaching ideas and webinars.
Our webinars offer practical how-to’s featuring Learning Network editors as well as teachers who use The Times in their classrooms. Our lesson plans (limited to five per month for nonsubscribers) offer teaching ideas and links to additional resources in The Times and elsewhere.
A contest that can act as a culminating project.
Over the years we’ve heard from many teachers that our contests serve as final projects in their classes, and this curriculum came about in large part because we want to help teachers “plan backwards” to support those projects.
All contest entries are considered by experts, whether Times journalists, outside educators from partner organizations, or professional practitioners in a related field. Winning means being published on our site, and, perhaps, in the print edition of The New York Times.
Below are the seven units we will offer in the 2019-20 school year. The personal narrative unit link is live so you can get started, and we’ll add the links for the other six units throughout the year.
September-October
While The Times is known for its award-winning journalism, the paper also has a robust tradition of publishing personal essays on topics like love, family, life on campus and navigating anxiety. And on our site, our daily writing prompts have long invited students to tell us their stories, too.
In this unit we draw on many of these resources, plus some of the 1,000-plus personal essays from the Magazine’s long-running Lives column, to help students find their own “short, memorable stories” and tell them well. Our related mentor-text lessons will help them practice skills like writing with voice, using details to show rather than tell, structuring a narrative arc and more.
As a final project, we invite students to send finished essays to our new Personal Narrative Essay Contest, the first contest of the school year.
October-November
Unit 2: The Review
Book reports and literary essays have long been staples of language arts classrooms, but this unit encourages students to learn how to critique art in other genres as well.
In our new Mentor Texts series, we will feature the work of Times critics to help students understand the elements of a successful review. We’ll also spotlight the work of teenage contest winners from previous years.
As a culminating project, we invite students to send us their own reviews of a book, movie, restaurant, album, theatrical production, video game, dance performance, TV show, art exhibition or any other kind of work The Times critiques.
December-January
Unit 3: Analysis and Connection-Making
In this unit, we invite students to write about the connections they see between what they’re studying in school and the world outside the classroom.
As we write in the annual announcement for our related contest:
So you’re studying the Civil War — or Shakespeare, or evolution or “The Bluest Eye.” Why? What does it have to do with your life and the lives of those around you? Why should you remember it once you’ve turned in that paper or taken that test?
Winners of this contest from past years have written about similarities between the #MeToo movement and Newton’s first two laws of motion; climate change and a concerto; social media apps and George Orwell’s “1984”; and more.
To support this year’s contest, we will be publishing a mentor-text guided practice series that shows how Times journalists write about literature, history, science and the arts by doing this same kind of contextualizing that helps us see the relevance of a topic in our lives today.
January-February
Unit 4: Informational Writing
This unit will invite students to take any STEM-related discovery, process or idea they like and write about it in a way that makes it understandable and engaging for a general audience.
The short pieces in the Trilobites column of the Science Times, which unearth “fascinating morsels of science” each week, will be our chief models to demonstrate how skilled writers can elucidate complex topics.
At the end of the unit, we’ll invite teenagers to submit their own writing to a new STEM-writing contest (details to come!) to show us what they’ve learned.
February-March
Unit 5: Argumentative Writing
The demand for evidence-based argumentative writing is now woven into school assignments across the curriculum and grade levels, and you couldn’t ask for better real-world examples than what you can find in The Times Opinion section.
This unit will, like our others, be supported with writing prompts, mentor-text lesson plans, webinars and more. We’ll also focus on the winning teenage writing we’ve received over the six years we’ve run our related contest.
At a time when media literacy is more important than ever, we also hope that our annual Student Editorial Contest can serve as a final project that encourages students to broaden their information diets with a range of reliable sources, and learn from a variety of perspectives on their chosen issue.
April-May
Unit 6: Multi-Genre Writing
Our writing units so far have all asked for essays of one kind or another, but this spring contest invites students to do what journalists at The Times do every day: make multimedia to tell a story, investigate an issue or communicate a concept.
Our annual podcast contest gives students the freedom to talk about anything they want in any form they like. In the past we’ve had winners who’ve done personal narratives, local travelogues, opinion pieces, interviews with community members, local investigative journalism and descriptions of scientific discoveries.
This year we will help support the contest with great examples from The Times and around the web, as well as with mentor texts that offer guided practice in understanding elements and techniques.
June-August
Unit 7: Independent Reading and Writing
At a time when teachers are looking for ways to offer students more “voice and choice,” this unit, based on our annual summer contest, offers both.
Every year since 2010 we have invited teenagers around the world to add The New York Times to their summer reading lists and, so far, nearly 60,000 have. Every week for 10 weeks, we ask participants to choose something in The Times that has sparked their interest, then tell us why. At the end of the week, judges from the Times newsroom pick favorite responses, and we publish them on our site.
We will use our new Mentor Text feature to spotlight the work of past winners, and explain why newsroom judges admired their thinking.
Because this is our most open-ended contest — students can choose whatever they like, and react however they like — it has proved over the years to be a useful place for young writers to hone their voices, practice skills and take risks.
As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions. And if your school or district is interested in learning more about how to use our resources to teach writing, let us know. Our email is LNFeedback@nytimes.com.
Our Fifth Annual Student Review Contest
Contest Dates: Nov. 7, 2019 – Dec. 10, 2019
Do you have strong opinions about books, music, fashion, restaurants or TV shows? Are you a theater buff or a foodie?
If so, you’re in luck. In this contest, we invite you to play critic and write an original review for our Fifth Annual Student Review Contest.
What can you choose? Anything that fits into a category of creative expression that The New York Times covers — from architecture to video games.
We do ask, however, that you pick something new to you. Part of the reason we created this contest is to encourage you to stretch your cultural imagination. So go see a local art, design or fashion show; explore a building; watch a movie or TV show or dance performance or play; listen to an album; read a book; play a game or eat in a restaurant that is novel and interesting to you.
Please note: For the first time ever, we plan to have two submission categories for this contest: middle school and high school. We will update this page with more detailed rules and submission forms on or before Nov. 7, 2019, the date when this contest officially opens.
Until then, here are useful resources so teachers and students can begin planning for this contest:
• Our 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015 winners, runners-up and honorable mentions.
• Our lesson plan “Thinking Critically: Reading and Writing Culture Reviews.”
• A link to add this contest to your Google calendar.
• Our contest rubric.
If you have any questions about this contest, please contact us at LNFeedback@nytimes.com.
_________
2019 Contest Rules and Guidelines
1. Review something that fits into one of the categories of creative expression that The Times reviews.
• books (fiction, nonfiction and children’s books)
• video games
• music (albums and events, popular and classical)
• movies
• theater
• TV shows
• fashion
• architecture
• dance
• art
• restaurants
• hotels
• technology
2. Be concise. The review must be 450 words or fewer, not including the title.
3. Assert an opinion and back it up. A review is not simply a plot summary or description. State an opinion and support it with detail that makes your case.
4. Know your audience. Be mindful that you are submitting a review to The New York Times, not to a school newspaper, and that your potential audience therefore includes a broader cross-section of people. But, be sure to take into account who the creative work’s target audience is as well. For example, if you are reviewing a video game intended for 10-year-old girls, aim to write a review that will be useful for 10-year-old girls (and their parents).
5. Write something original. For this contest, you cannot submit anything you have already published, whether in a school newspaper or elsewhere.
6. Whatever you choose to review, it should be new to you. That doesn’t mean it can’t be a classic work and has been around for decades — just that it should be a fresh experience for you.
7. Use appropriate and engaging language, and give context. Assume that your audience is interested in learning more about your topic but does not have the same background about it that you do.
8. Only one submission per student is allowed.
9. What is the “prize”? Having your work published on The Learning Network.
10. We plan to offer two different categories for this contest: middle school and high school. Please stay tuned for more details.
Our Fifth Annual Student Editorial Cartoon Contest
Contest Dates: Oct. 3, 2019 – Nov. 12, 2019
On The Learning Network, we invite teenagers to write about their opinions daily, but it’s only during our annual Editorial Cartoon Contest that we ask them to illustrate those ideas.
With this, our Fifth Annual Editorial Cartoon Contest, we invite students to channel their thoughts into images. So if you have something to say about issues like the 2020 presidential race, climate change, student loans, racism, vaping or gun control — all topics the 2018 winners took on — or about any other subject The Times covers, try making an editorial cartoon that shows us what you think.
Please note: We will update this page with more detailed rules and submission instructions on or before Oct. 3, 2019, the date when this contest officially opens.
Here are useful resources so teachers and students can begin planning for this contest:
• Our 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015 winners, runners-up and honorable mentions
• Our lesson plan “Drawing for Change: Analyzing and Making Political Cartoons”
• A link to add this contest to your Google calendar
• Our contest rubric
If you have any questions about this contest, please contact us at LNFeedback@nytimes.com.
_________
2019 Contest Rules and Guidelines
1. For this contest, we are accepting drawings or illustrations, or a series of artworks, that offer commentary or criticism about current issues, political topics or historical events covered in The New York Times. Format examples include, but are not limited to, single-panel drawings with captions, sequential comic art, illustrations or digitally created drawings.
2. Don’t be afraid to take a stand or have an opinion. Editorial cartoons illustrate a point, prompt a realization or offer an example.
3. Your submission must link to at least one related Times source. Since The Times has been publishing since 1851 and because content from any section or era can be inspiration for your work, that should be easy. If you’re stuck, try searching; you may be surprised at how much you can find in The Times.
4. Create something original. For this contest, you cannot submit anything you have already published, whether in a school newspaper or elsewhere. Be careful not to plagiarize.
5. The work you send in should be appropriate for a Times audience. Create your cartoon for a well-informed audience, but include enough background information to give context.
6. Create your cartoon by yourself or with a partner, but make sure you only submit one entry in this contest. If you’re submitting as part of a team, you should not also submit as an individual. If you are submitting a series of illustrations or panels as your cartoon, be sure that your entry is contained in one image file to be uploaded.
7. We will use this rubric (PDF) to judge editorial cartoons. The top cartoons, as judged by The Times and professional cartoonists, will be featured on The Learning Network.
8. What is the “prize”? Having your work published on The Learning Network — and, potentially, in print in a Times special section.
9. Submissions must be from middle and high school students, ages 13 and up. Since internet privacy laws are changing in the U.S. and around the world, please stay tuned for exact details about age requirements in different countries.
10. The children and stepchildren of New York Times employees are not eligible to enter this contest. Nor are teenagers who live in the same household as a Times employee.
