Study Guide

LEARNING & MEMORY: What do we remember?

We remember almost everything for a very short time. But what we remember over the long-term depends largely on how meaningful the information to be remembered is.

This, for instance, is why we often forget a phone number so easily ... those numbers mean nothing to us. Clever marketers come up with schemes to help make phone numbers more meaningful like "call 123-FISH".

Take advantage of the way your memory works by doing whatever you can to make what you are trying to learn meaningful. Research has found two important ways to make information more meaningful:

Strategy 1: Association

One way to give more meaning to what you are trying to learn is to associate the new information to knowledge currently in your memory. In other words, associate what you are learning with what you already know. If, for example, a physics instructor told you about an atom in theoretical terms, it would probably make little sense to you. But if the instructor says:

"Well, think of the atom as being like the universe, with a sun in the middle and planets orbiting the sun and lots of space in between. The sun is like the atom nucleus and the planets are like the atom's electrons."

This would make more sense because the new information (the theoretical structure of an atom) is associated with something you already know (the basic structure of the universe). If you can somehow get what you are currently learning to "hook onto" what you already know, then there is more likelihood you will understand and remember it.

Some hints to increase your use of association:

• read the textbook chapter before class
• paraphrase the information in your own words
• try to apply what you learn to your own life/situation
• think about what you learn.

Strategy 2: Organization

The other useful way to make what you learn more meaningful is to organize it into groupings which:

• are manageable in size
• make sense to you.

If, for example, you have one large mass of information to learn, it will probably make more sense if you break it up into small groups, perhaps giving each group a descriptive heading.

One student actually went so far as to cut up his class notes with scissors, and rearrange them based on the topics and sub-topics they covered.

You may not want to go that far, but it is a good idea to at least make your notes on loose-leaf paper, so that you can shuffle them around. Just because your instructor or your text present things in a given order, does not mean that is a logical order for you. After all, you're the one who has to understand it! However you choose to do it, organizing what you learn in some way is essential. Imagine an office where there was no filing system ... everything was just thrown into a drawer. It would be pretty hard to find things, wouldn't it? But if things are put away in a logical manner, they can be more easily found.

Some other hints:

• make an outline of your notes
• diagram how information fits together
• use headings and sub-headings
• look for similarities in topics.

Other Strategies

Select. Try to reduce information down to its main points. You need not remember everything all at once. Break it down to the main ideas and work from there.

Review. It's one of the hardest things to get yourself to do, but if you review regularly, you will benefit. Review doesn't mean just reading over, by the way. You must think about what you are reviewing for it to be of use.

Visualization. Form an image in your mind of whatever it is that you want to remember. One way to do this is by trying to remember a picture of the page on which maps, charts, or diagrams appear, and then later trying to remember that picture of the page.