If you’re a college freshman, I hate to break it to you but college level courses aren’t as easy as high-school classes.
Your high-school teachers spent weeks slowly covering basic concepts, making surface level information easy to learn
But college is different…
Professors break down complex topics at a fast pace, while expecting you to learn more in less time…
And from my experience as a college senior, most freshmen use inefficient study tactics that prevent them from gaining a deep understanding of class material.
If you spend hours upon hours rereading the same notes and highlighting texts, while your grades suffer…
Imagine, you’re getting prepared to study for your next exam. You have your textbook open, your notes are ready, but you’re watching a TikTok on your phone. Or maybe you have a Netflix show on in the background for some “background noise”. Does this scenario sound a little familiar?
It may feel like you’re being productive because you’re multitasking multiple things at the same time, but in reality, cognitive psychology says otherwise. You’re not actually multitasking; you’re performing something called divided attention and it might be the reason why your study sessions aren’t as useful as you expected them to be. Don’t worry though, in this post I will discuss what you can do to balance your study and TikTok time.
What is Divided Attention?
Divided attention occurs when you try to focus on more than one task at a time. It splits all your mental energy between multiple tasks, unlike focused attention, where all your mental energy goes to one task. Your brain isn’t designed to completely process multiple tasks at once. Instead, it switches between the tasks, resulting in something called the switching cost. The switching cost is when you lose time, make more errors, and overall remember less information [1]. Research shows that even small distractions, like your phone buzzing or music playing in the background, can affect how you store information in your memory [2]. This is true when it comes to studying, because the more divided your attention is, the harder it is to understand and remember the information you’re learning. So next time you think that multitasking will save time, remember that it’s most likely the opposite.
Studying for college exams can be stressful and scary especially when you do not know what to study, or how to know what information or material you should be reviewing. Not knowing what to study or how to study can cause students to not get the best results from reviewing, or completely avoiding it altogether because it does not help. When studying do you ever think back to see if you can recall the information? Knowing what you will be able to recall is known as metamemory. Using metamemory you can estimate how well you will be able to remember something, or judge how well you will be able to bring it forward when that information is needed. Maybe sometimes you have studied, and when you are given the exam you cannot quite pull the information forward that you know is in there somewhere. This is also metamemory.
The beginning weeks of college can be a very stressful and overwhelming time. To cope with this our mind uses several strategies that we are not aware of. Visual imagery is just one of these. Visual imagery involves picturing things in your mind even if you are not looking directly at them (4). This can involve seeing something from the past or present. We have the ability to represent spatial patterns from memory (4). Simply put, if you experience visual images when answering questions, you are experiencing visual imagery. For example, throughout our entire collegiate career and life for that matter, but even more so in the first few weeks of our college experience, our mind is using the process of visual imagery to process the emotional and mental challenges that come with starting college. The first few weeks of college can be full of chaos as we meet multiple new people, attend new classes, try to remember every last thing on the syllabi, and try to navigate living on our own for the first time. Being able to create mental images such as a schedule that is jam packed allows us to associate those experiences with just a quick picture.
