How students can master Memory Techniques for academic success
No student wants to have a bad time with subjects or preparation for examinations. To achieve this demands mastering memory techniques. No matter your level of education, you need to at a point memorize so as to be able to recall the facts later. This helps the brain to encode, re-package and recall important information.
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Spending hour upon hour revising a subject is all well and good but if only a little bit of it sticks in your memory then it really is a soul-destroying process as well as a waste of time.
There are a number of techniques that can be used to make things easier to remember. For example, just reading through your notes is fairly ineffective simply because your mind strays elsewhere but making notes will condense your course-work into something far more concise and easier to remember.
The very fact that you are writing it down will also help to fix it more firmly in your memory.
Here are some techniques you can use to help commit those years of work to memory and at the end of the chapter I’ll show you how I used some of them to commit to the memory part of the periodic table for my Chemistry ‘A’ level.
Learn small amounts at frequent intervals
It is far easier to commit things to memory if you do it a little bit at a time. So make use of every spare moment you get to do small bits of learning. For example, in the five minutes you spend waiting at the bus stop you could learn five new foreign words or memorise a couple of lines of a poem. Five new foreign words a day is 150 in a month and seeing as the time at the bus-stop is normally wasted you will have put it to an extremely good use.
Understanding something makes it easier to remember
Whatever you want to memorise whether it is a poem, part of a play or a scientific proof it is a lot easier if you actually understand it. The very process of going through something and understanding it automatically makes the memorising process easier.
For example, if you can’t understand a foreign language then learning even a simple sentence is difficult. But if you understand the language enough to make sense of the sentence and suddenly it becomes much easier to remember.
Make your notes visually exciting
Make as much use of colour as possible. A set of notes is generally pretty dull and boring to look at. A multicoloured set of notes jumps off the page at you – the various points stand out simply because they are in a different colour.
You will often find that if you shut your eyes just after looking at the notes for a little while you will still be able to picture them in your mind. In other words you have already partially committed them to memory.
If you shut your eyes in the exam you should hopefully be able to recall specific notes in the same way. You can reinforce this visual memory technique even more by writing sideways or at an angle or perhaps in different styles. The more interesting and exciting something is to look at, the easier it will be to remember.
Visualise what you are memorising
Try and visualise what you are trying to learn as much as possible. For instance, when learning a poem or a piece of text, picture the scene in your mind as you read each line. This makes recall much easier than simply trying to learn the words.
Stick large coloured notices on your walls listing things you want to memorise. Put little notes by the kettle and the telephone. As you sit and work and glance at the wall or as you speak on the ‘phone you will see these notes and gradually the picture of them will become fixed in your mind. You will soon find that by closing your eyes you will be able to visualise the ‘phone with the note beside it and will be able to recall what was written on the note. Once again notice how the use of colour crops up to make mental pictures easier to remember and recall.
Use silly word associations when you need to memorise foreign words, technical terms, biological or chemical terminology etc. etc. For instance, I can still remember a German word that I learnt in 2 seconds flat ten years ago. The word is Rathaus meaning town-hall and I remembered it by picturing a grand town-hall like building with rats running all over the place, like in the Pied-Piper story. The more bizarre the word association the easier it is to remember.
Make use of rhymes and silly phrases as much as possible. Often you will have been taught a silly rhyme in a lesson. As an example, if I were to ask you to name the months with only 30 days you would probably resort to the rhyme – “30 days has September, April, June and November.” Another such rhyme is “i before e except after c.” If you need to learn a group of words, perhaps they are the labels on a diagram, then grouping them together in a way in which they form a rhyme or can be sung immediately makes them more memorable. The next time you have to learn a poem try fitting the words to a song you know and like.
Test yourself or get others to test you regularly. Whatever you are trying to learn self-testing not only checks your knowledge but also continues to fix things more firmly in your memory.
If you need to learn something off by heart parrot-fashion then the best way of going about it is to split it into small sections. For example, if you are committing a poem to memory split it into 4 line sections, (unless of course it is already in, short verses). Learn the poem section by section.
When you’ve learnt the first move on to the second, then to the third and so on. Most people don’t automatically work this way – they tend to start at the beginning and learn a few lines, go back to the beginning, repeat what they’ve just learnt and learn the next couple of lines.
The trouble with this is that you spend an awful lot of time repeating the early parts. Admittedly this fixes them in your memory but it does also mean that the further you go through the text, the fewer times you’ve been over it and the less well you will have memorised it. Working section by section ensures that each piece of text is learnt as well as the last.
Use Mnemonic Devices to increase memorability
Memorising lists of words, (e.g. labels on a diagram), can be made easier by taking the initial letter of each word and making a silly sentence out of them. For example, consider a diagram of a human with the labels head, neck, arm, stomach, leg and foot.
Taking the initial letters gives us H, N, A, S, Li and F. We can then make up a sentence such as “Happy Nancy And Simon Love Figs”, using the same initial letters. This makes it much easier to remember the six initial letters of the labels and when drawing the diagram in the exam this silly sentence will help you to put them in the correct place and also help you remember what the labels are. (Memorising labels in this way also makes it easier to draw the diagram because these strange techniques all work hand in hand in fixing things in your mind.)
Memorizing Diagrams and drawings
Committing diagrams to memory is easy if you continually draw them and test yourself. Always draw the diagram in the same way each time, starting and finishing at the same point and always putting the labels in the same position. This helps you to get to know what the complete picture looks like. If the labels are in a different place each time then you will simply confuse your visual memory.
The continuous drawing of the diagram in the same way time after time not only commits the diagram to memory but also the drawing process itself. Simply by remembering the ‘funny squiggle’ halfway through can jog your memory when recreating the diagram which may in turn jog your memory to come up with an associated label. Don’t forget that use of colour will also help make your diagram more memorable.
Read: Revision methods that works for all examinations
Putting the strategies and memory techniques for academic success into practice should be students to learn and return with fun and easy. This can help improve grades in the long run. Obviously not all of these techniques will work for everyone but try them out and adapt them to your own needs.
Summary
Learn small amounts at frequent intervals
Understanding something makes it easier to remember
Make your notes visually exciting, e.g. use colour
Visualise what you are memorising
Make use of rhymes, songs, word associations’ etc.
Test yourself regularly
Image Credit:pixabay.com
Source: NOT YET KNOWN
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