HOW TO REMEMBER WHAT YOU STUDY
As a psychology student, I have studied about Memory; its encoding, storage and retrieval process, how memory is organised in our minds, and how we can improve our memory.
Studying involves using our memory because we may need to remember excessive information at a time during examinations, or to understand complex concepts which may include a lot of numbers, formulas, or labeling of diagrams etc. Therefore, I feel that knowing some memory techniques or knowing how to remember or retrieve what we’ve already learnt will be extremely useful for students or even for people who work.
There are many suggested ways in which we can improve our memory. There are some memory aids we may use like making Mnemonics, which is a technique which relies on the linking of ‘to-be-remembered’ information with an organised set of images or words that are already firmly established in our long-term memory and can therefore serve as reminder cues. To make this definition easier, we can imagine a cloakroom where “reminder cues” are pegs and the “to-be-remembered” information is hung on these pegs! For example, to remember the names of Great Lakes we can associate the first letter of every lake with the word HOMES - Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior.
Another Mnemonic device is ‘Stories You Tell Yourself’ which is to relate the information in a made-up story. For example, if we need to remember the following list of words; lumberjack, dart, skate, hedge, colony duck, furniture, stocking, pillow, mistress
We can remember these unrelated items by relating them together in a story we make up. The made up story might go as follows: “a lumberjack darted out of the forest, skated around a hedge past a colony of ducks. he tripped on some furniture, tearing his stocking, while rushing toward the pillow where his mistress lay.”
Yet another technique is Chunking. It simply means grouping or combining certain parts of information and remembering those chunks of information instead of the whole information all together. For example, if we are required to remember a credit card number- 19141609007, it would help to break down the number into chunks. The first four numbers can be remembered as an year in history, the next four numbers can be chunked as a date too, while the last three numbers form a chunk which is easy to remember by itself.
For all the above techniques it is important to use our originality, creativity or imagination, because that would enable us to remember what we have learnt more clearly and accurately. It is important to understand that these techniques help us to remember what we have learnt more clearly because we are LINKING or ASSOCIATING new information with ALREADY STORED information in our minds.
Mnemonics are fun to use and can be helpful in remembering many things. We all want to remember what we need to know in courses or in our work, as we can best and so we will need to go beyond the mnemonic techniques.
1. Study is work and takes time
We all have been in a situation where we leave homework or essays till the last day because we think it won’t take as much time. But, we all regret it later because studying is work, and it definitely takes up time. So, plan a schedule that you can stick to. During the time you set aside for study, work at it instead of talking to your friends or spending massive amounts of time on Instagram/Tumblr/Youtube. If we spend that time scheduled for study by studying, we will find that we still have plenty of time left for other activities.
2. Rehearse the Information
Rehearsal is simply keeping the new information at the center of attention by repeating it silently or aloud. The more an item of information is rehearsed, the more likely it is to be remembered, because it will get transferred to our long-term memory. In the last few years, experiments have indicated that the sheer amount of rehearsal may be less important than the ways in which the information is rehearsed. Maintenance rehearsal is simply going over and over what is to be remembered. It is a passive repetition of the information (merely repeating the information). Elaborative rehearsal is more likely to succeed because it involves organizing and giving meaning to the information as it is being rehearsed. It is an active process of repetition- thinking about what is being rehearsed in an effort to relate it to other things that we know or are learning.
3. Organize the Information
While rehearsing, we will start to organize or arrange the information into categories, groups or in a way which makes “sense” to us. This is called Organizational Encoding. We may make tables, charts, diagrams, separate information through headings, subheadings or paragraphs, make groups or categories to organize the information. We can do this both mentally or/and also on paper through making notes.
After planning, rehearsing and organizing the information try to get an idea of how much you remember. If you study by breaking the study material into parts, test yourself after each part. Go back over what you have studied using the organized material (headings, pointers, diagrams, tables, flashcards etc) as reminder cues.This will tell you what you know and what you need to work on. By testing ourselves, we will also be practicing our retrieval skills.
5. Revise/Review before Examination
We may forget many details we learned. Use the organization of the study material and go back over the things you have forgotten, relearning them the way you learned them in the first place. It is important to relearn the information in the same way because the information is already stored and organized and just needs brushing up, so following the same path of learning will speed up the process of remembering what you have learnt. Revising/reviewing should also be based on the type of examination you are taking. Long answer type/essay type questions will usually look for major ideas and experiments which support the information. Trying to think of what the questions will be ahead of time and practicing the answers to them is a good idea. For MCQ’s/objective type questions be sure to know the definitions of words and also be able to recognize a word through a definition. However, that being said this doesn’t mean to neglect certain terms or ideas for any examination; just give a little emphasis, depending on the type of examination.
To conclude, studying to remember involves planning, rehearsal, organization, feedback or testing, review/revision, and over-learning. It is a word psychologists use for the phrase “practice makes perfect”. Studies have shown that such “over-learning” works to reduce the amount forgotten.
References: Introduction to Psychology by Clifford T. Morgan, Richard A. King, John R. Weisz and John Schopler
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