Successful Studying

Studying and learning is something most people experience, and developing a good study regime can be very helpful in passion exams, but what are the key ways to actually learn? There are dozens of learning tips and pyramids out there, but how do you know what actually works? New research published in the journal Science 1 finds that being tested is a good way to learn and remember information, with 50% more information being able to be recalled a week later. Memory is all about retrieval, and so learning the best mechanisms to tap in to that is vital. Testing also allows people to identify gaps in there knowledge and so they don’t become over confident. It was also found that student who use diagrams during there studying were able to remember more details. Recalling may be more difficult, but because its reinforcement learning it will actually be easier to recall the memory later on.

A recent article on the BBC 2 also focused on methods of learning, this time examining the relationship between difficult to read fonts and retaining the information, which was part of a study published in the journal of Cognition. The idea behind this is that the person has to ‘concentrate more’ and used a ‘deeper kind of learning’. Both these studied points at little changes that can be made in order to improve memory skills and be more successful in exams.

Other skills and tricks people find useful is using something funny or interesting in order to memories a group of things. For example, you can use the Memory Place 3 technique to remember a room and then attach a thing to remember to each item in the room, then you simple need to recall the room in order to remember the desired items. The same technique can be applied to a journey or to a story or situation. At the end of the day, a combination of hard work and a variety of different techniques are likely to be successful. Linking colour, images and other visual stimulation will activate other parts of the brain and help with memory recall that just blind memorization on its own. However, revision and memory techniques are a personal thing and one in which everyone develops different systems that work for them.


1 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/01/19/science.1199327.abstract
2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11573666
3 http://bonar13.web.id/2010/01/memory-palace-imaginary-journey-to-remember-things-better/