Abstract:

Research has shown that mnemonics have potential in aiding long-term memory of taught information and thus can be applied in pedagogical contexts. To provide a means of creating and disseminating mnemonics and to account for the dissimilar schedules of students outside of classrooms, interactive tools can enable students to create their own mnemonics and learn at their own convenience. However, there is limited research on developing such tools and their effectiveness in fostering knowledge retention. To address this research gap, we conducted a scoping review of the extant literature on mnemonics-creation tools. The review was initiated with a systematic search of five databases (ACM Digital Library, Inspec, ProQuest, Scopus, and Web of Science). The criteria for including relevant papers were that they were user studies about interactive tools that support the creation of mnemonics, must be peer-reviewed, and must be written in English. This study followed the PRISMA guidelines. Two researchers, guided by a senior researcher, conducted and reported the results of the paper screening and selection process using the PRISMA flowchart. They then extracted and tabulated the relevant data and results from the selected papers in a Google Sheet. The screening resulted in 9 included papers, of which 2/9 (22.2\%) papers were published in the 2000s, 3/9 (33.3\%) in the 2010s, and 4/9 (44.4\%) in the 2020s. The target subject of the majority of the papers (5/9, 55.6\%) focused on language learning and the remaining (4/9, 44.4\%) covered miscellaneous domains such as healthcare or legal English terminology. The users were involved in the evaluation of the tool in 4/9 (44.4\%) of papers while 5/9 (55.6\%) did not prompt users for feedback. Most of the mnemonics were generated automatically using machine learning (6/9, 66.7\%) while others used manually created mnemonics (3/9, 33.3\%). Mnemonic keywords were found to be the most popular type of mnemonics (3/9, 33.3\%), followed by acronyms (2/9, 22.2\%), mnemonic stories (1/9, 11.1\%), mnemonic phrases (1/9, 11.1\%), musical mnemonics (1/9, 11.1\%), and general mnemonics (1/9, 11.1\%). The target users for the tools were mainly adults, either young adults between the ages of 18 and 22 (3/9, 33.3\%) or adults above the age of 22 (3/9, 33.3\%). Most of the reviewed papers did not specify the level of education of target users (6/9, 66.6\%), while others were intended for individuals at university level (3/9, 33.3\%). All in all, the studies showed promising results regarding knowledge retention using mnemonic-based tools in memory-intensive instructions such as language learning. The findings suggest that further research is required to uncover the effectiveness of these tools in fostering long-term memory as well as personalizing tool- and user-generated mnemonics to meet user preferences.

Keywords:

Mnemonics, mnemonics generation, mnemonics creation, pedagogical tools, knowledge retention, memory, education, learning, effectiveness.