The Keyword Method in the Classroom: How to Remember the States and Their Capitals

the classroom, critics complain. The present study confronted the practitioner's lament. The learning task here came directly from an elementary-school social studies curriculum that requires students to learn and remember the capital cities of the USA. This task was linked to a technique that has proven extremely effective in a number of investigations. The technique, the keyword method, was developed by Richard Atkinson (1) for learning foreign language vocabulary. The components of the keyword method are not new. Indeed, they have long been part and parcel of the memory expert's "bag of tricks" (2). These components have even been submitted to scientific scrutiny (3). Atkinson's formalization of the keyword method, however, stimulated renewed interest in memory techniques. Our own research program has focussed on elementary-school children's success with the method (4, 5, 6). In the present study, the basic components of the keyword method were adapted to learning the names of state capitals. The original version of the keyword method (for learning foreign language vocabulary) is a two-step process. First, the learner must form a stable association be-