Is it all just memorisation?

As a memory researcher and teacher-educator, I sometimes get a negative reaction when I talk about improving teachers’ understanding of human memory. Am I suggesting that school learning is just a matter of memory? And isn’t memorisation a bad thing? I think that using memory effectively isn’t a bad thing at all, and in fact it’s inevitable – all learning involves memory on some level. In this article I explore what cognitive researchers mean when they talk about memory, as well as discussing some promising research findings that have begun to be applied to education.