June 26, 2019

Improving Your Memory: Tips for Students

While a college education is not all about memorization, it still constitutes a huge portion of it. If you constantly forget what you’ve heard or read, you are going to have a hard time getting your degree.

Fortunately, there are ways to improve your memory and techniques that make memorization and recall more effective.

Improving Your Memory: Tips for Students: eAskme
Improving Your Memory: Tips for Students: eAskme

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Here are some things you can start doing right now.

Spaced Repetition

The majority of students approach learning in the worst and least efficient way possible: they cram up for long periods at once (sometimes for many hours on end), beginning a couple of days before the moment they are going to need this information.

As a result, they struggle to remember it during the test or exam and are almost sure to forget almost everything in a couple of weeks.

An alternative that actually works is based on spaced repetition.

You break up the material into small chunks and study it for a little while at a time over an extended period, regularly returning to the information you’ve studied earlier to reinforce it.

This approach not just improves your long-term recall but also makes the task of memorization more approachable due to the smaller size of individual learning sessions.

Sleep

Sleep isn’t merely the time when you shut down to replenish lost energy.

When you sleep, your brain continues to work, albeit in a different mode than usually.

We don’t know exactly what it does, but there is plenty of evidence that this activity involves memory – the brain seems to categorize and analyze the information it acquired over a period of wakefulness.

If you don’t give it enough time to do it, it will negatively affect the results.

So don’t bend over backwards trying to complete every assignment you receive if it makes you sleep less than you should.

Delegate some of your work to a research paper writing help agency to free up some time for sleep.

If you choose a trustworthy company like Custom Writings, you won’t have to worry about the results.

Writing by Hand

Numerous studies indicate that recall can be improved by putting the information you want to memorize into a variety of forms.

The most efficient of them is writing it down by hand – that’s right, by recording or typing the lectures of your professors you actively decrease your likelihood of recalling them later on.

Although using a notepad may seem like a ridiculously low-tech approach these days, the facts speak for themselves – writing stuff down makes you remember it.

Strategic Use of Caffeine

Many students drink coffee to stay awake longer when they need to cram up for tomorrow’s test.

However, research shows that taking caffeine before studying doesn’t have any noticeable effect on the efficiency of memorization.

Counter-intuitively, the reverse seems to be true: when study participants took 200 mg of caffeine after studying, their ability to retain this information noticeably improved.

Method of Loci

Memory is all about context.

In college, you generally have to memorize abstract information that has little to no bearing on the things you are used to.

The method of loci is a mnemonic approach that rectifies this issue.

It boils down to the following: you imagine a familiar space (e.g., your home) and associate each piece of information you have to remember with a specific place in it.

As a result, you ground this bit of data in a real-world location.

Now you simply have to imagine yourself walking in this familiar space and looking around to remember where you’ve put each piece of information.

What methods do you use to remember things and improve your memory?

Share them in comments!

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