Even More Study Tips
Elaboration
What is it?
Elaborative interrogation is a specific method of elaboration. The word interrogation means to question. So, when you use elaborative interrogation, you ask yourself questions about how and why things work, and then produce the answers to these questions (1). The specific questions that you ask yourself will depend, in part, on the topics you are studying.
How to do it!
Start by making a list of all of the ideas you need to learn from your class materials. Then, go down the list and ask yourself questions about how these ideas work and why. As you ask yourself questions, go through your class materials and look for the answers to your questions.
Make connections between multiple ideas to-be-learned and explain how they work together. A good way to do this is to take two ideas and think about ways they are similar and ways they are different.
Describe how the ideas you are studying apply to your own life experiences or memories. In addition, as you go through your day, take notice of the things happening around you and make connections to the ideas you are learning in class. Doing this will engage an additional process that is highly effective: spacing learning over time.
You should work your way up to describing and explaining the ideas you are learning on your own, without your class materials in front of you. In other words, you should practice retrieval of the information!