As a teacher that has assigned my students a writing assignment to share what they most enjoyed during their recent field trip, I would be using this activity to facilitate the memory functions of attention, category knowledge, and elaboration. Capturing their attention is much easier when the assignment is personalized to them, so allowing them to write about their own experience of a field trip will provide an attention benefit. To maximize learning, "Teachers must immerse learners in complex, interactive experiences that are both rich and real," and a field trip to an interesting place fulfills both criteria ("Brain-based Learning," 2008). Moreover, "Students must have a personally meaningful challenge," because "Such challenges stimulate a student's mind to the desired state of alertness" ("Brain-based Learning," 2008). Samuelson and Smith (1998, p. 97) point out that "attention is generally grabbed by novelty-by events that fail to match (and fail to be predicted by) events in memory," so again, an essay about a field trip and the student's personal experiences on that field trip is unique and novel enough to gain his attention.
Category knowledge is also a relevant concept for this assignment. Category knowledge is created when the student "can build up a collection of internal models" by "partitioning [his] experiences into distinct categories...that apply to many similar objects or events, allowing [him] to use [his] past experience to interpret and respond adaptively to the current situation" (Clapper & Bower, 1991). The site and subject of the field trip identify a category that the student can use to mentally categorize the information he learns there.
Elaboration provides a framework for organizing instruction "in increasing order of complexity for optimal learning" (Reigeluth, n.d.). The teacher presents the simplest version of a task first and then adds on additional versions in subs
...