Difficult to pronounce, and even more difficult for your students to spell, mnemonics are a very useful way of remembering a lot of content quickly. They are therefore ideal in the run up to the January exams. Mnemonics are nothing new and by definition include any learning technique that aids memory.
My Sociology students will be sitting an exam which contains a 52 mark question about research methods. I came up with the following mnemonic to help them remember the various issues which they need to cover in their answer. Although I devised this with the OCR G671 examination in mind; hopefully it is general enough to be suitable for other Sociology methods questions too:
Validity
Reliability
Studies – A reminder to make links to other sociological research
Representativeness
Practical issues
Ethics
Theoretical issues – Positivism and Interpretivism
There are online mnemonic generators if you are struggling for inspiration. I think that Spacefem’s random generator is the quickest and easiest to use: http://spacefem.com/mnemonics
However, it is more effective (and funnier) if students devise the mnemonics themselves. A word of caution; keep it simple. If the mnemonic is very abstract it will be difficult to remember, which somewhat defeats the purpose!
