Students may be frustrated to learn information as isolated bundles of facts without seeing the bigger picture. The younger the students are, the harder it will be for them to make those connections themselves, so it is likely that the students would benefit from some teacher guidance here.

In history classes, for instance, different battles likely worked together to give the full effect of a longer-term war. If students just try to memorize the time of each battle and who was involved independently, they will likely struggle, as there is no “faster” way to remember the information. As a teacher, it would be a good idea to ensure students understand the larger, big-picture conflict, namely why the war began, what the motives were for fighting, etc. Students can then draw on this conceptual base as they try to learn facts about individual battles. Let the history come out as a story; that will make it much easier for students to remember details.

In a STEM class, the way in which concepts unify is somewhat different. If students get enough practice doing problems, the ways by which concepts, equations, and theories can be combined to solve difficult problems will become ingrained in their minds. Consider viewing another blogpost of mine for more details on this matter: http://blog.opencurriculum.org/dont-just-learn-it-practice-it/. I encourage teachers to demonstrate a lot of examples in their classes, and indicate explicitly where key concepts are being used and why. This routine, if exercised by a teacher, should become natural fairly quickly.

Giving students bigger-picture ideas gives them the neural foundation by which to remember smaller details more accurately and quickly. The exact techniques used to do this varies by subject and the age of your students, but the same conceptual framework can be applied to a wide variety of classroom scenarios.