Author: alexbswan

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Similar Problems Have Similar Solutions

By Alexander Brittain

College students have a huge responsibility in their first year of college. They are expected to achieve academic goals that they set prior to starting the school year. There are many cognitive psychology strategies that can be used to exel in the classroom. By using these strategies you will utilize your time studying and learning in the classes you take. The strategy that I am going to talk about is how to solve problems using analogies. Analogies are used to reach a goal by utilizing past information. Analogies play a key role in problem-solving, decision-making, perception, and more.

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Throwing Shade: The Art of Using Color to Study

by Merik Flatt-Beer

Do you take your notes in color? Maybe you should start.

Note taking is the one thing that remains constant throughout the years in education. Your parents took notes, their parents took notes, your professors took notes from their professors who took notes. But, your notes don’t have to be the same notes they’ve been taking all these years. Back in the day, students were stuck with sad, boring ink and pencils in the same three colors for generations. Why don’t we try something new? Nowadays, along with the invention of sparkly gel pens for the people who still write theirs in notebooks, many students have started to take notes on computers, which makes it even easier than ever before to introduce colors and graphics into your delightful shorthand. Not only does this make it more fun to take notes, but it also helps to keep you engaged, and even helps you remember the information you’re taking notes on.

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Respect the Concept

By Braden Weaver

When it comes to school, there is always those questions that absolutely stump you, whether it be a test or a homework problem. In my almost 18 year career as a student, it has got to be one of the worst feelings to be completely blank and have no clue where to begin. My previous mindset was “well its either I know it or I don’t”. Please DO NOT try this it could result in bad grades. The better way to come up with the answer is to try and remember past lessons that have similar concepts to the problem at hand, then start breaking down that problem in order to solve it. This is where conceptual knowledge comes into play. Conceptual knowledge refers to the knowledge of, or understanding of concepts, principles, theories, models, and classifications. Now you’re probably thinking “how on earth am I going to be able to do this in a limited time?”. The process of connecting a lesson to another lesson is a lot quicker than you think. There are actually a few ways you can boost your conceptual knowledge to make you a better student guaranteed! One of the first ways is to be able to group things just by looking at them. For example, look at the picture below. Just by looking at it you can already tell what those objects are. That’s right, they’re vegetables! The second way you can better improve your concept skills is to be able to make connections between things. If I had a list of broccoli, zucchini, and celery, it would be easy to put all of them in a Venn diagram to find out differences and similarities between the three vegetables. Lastly, students like yourself can transfer the ideas that you can get from vegetables and use it to find something more important. For example, which vegetable is considered the healthiest? Just something that is a little more complex.

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How functional fixedness impacts people

By Alayna Missel

Have you heard of the term functional fixedness? Properly not considering you are a freshman in college. I am here to give you some tips on studying with regards to functional fixedness. The term functional fixedness is defined as when old information that a person has learned interferes with their ability to process and learn new information. This happens because functional fixedness is a form of a fixation. A fixation is when a person focuses on the one singular, often the most common use of an item and this inhibits the person to think outside of the box in which they could be able to use the item in different ways. Why am I telling you these definitions you might ask? I am telling you because in order to be successful sometimes you have to think outside the box when looking for a solution to a problem.

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Blind to Reality

By Kennedy Savage

You’re driving down the road windows down and music blasting, while looking out the window you notice the sunset and people going about their day. All of a sudden your focus shifts and you notice a car swerving into your lane, unable to break fast enough you rear end the car causing a traffic incident. This split second failure to notice fully visible, yet often times unexpected objects is and example of inattentional blindness.  

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Does Depth Matter?

By Emily Lange

Have you ever been sitting in a lecture, copying notes from the slideshow and suddenly realize you have no clue what you wrote for the last three slides? You have been feverishly copying the slides as quickly as you can, but how have you not learned a single thing? This is because you have been processing the information in a shallow manner, meaning that you were not paying close attention to the meaning of what you were writing. How can you learn to process the information you learn in class at a deeper level? Using Levels of Process theory can help you to become a better student!

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Don’t bet on it! How availability heuristics hinder our study practices.

By Kate Summers

Picture this: You are walking down the hallway, out of the classroom when you hear, “Hey! You! Yes, YOU! Are you ready for our test on Friday?”. You shrug off the comment because inside you are really freaking out about the test. Your first big college test is just days away…and you haven’t even started studying. You run back to the dorm to start studying and studying and studying. All of a sudden it is Friday, TEST DAY and you can’t remember any of the information you have studied for the past two days. What went wrong? How could studying result in a bad grade?

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Dual Coding: Two Perspectives in Learning

By Marisa Murillo

Have you ever wondered how to store information easier in your memory? I have always failed to remember things because I did not simply know how to study memorization. The fact is, I didn’t need to study memorization, but I needed to learn and comprehend the information to actually gain knowledge on certain topics. In high school, many students may not have to study for their exams or quizzes but that all changes in college. College pushes students to study in order to learn the information they will be later tested on and have to apply to their future careers. Dual coding theory is a theory that attempts to explain cognition in terms of two separate yet partly interconnected systems. The two systems can work independently of each other or they can work together in an integrated way, often applying better outcomes. These two systems include a verbal system specialized for dealing with language and a non-verbal system for representing and processing knowledge about objects and events. Dual coding has a lot to deal with the concreteness of information. The theory is known to predict the information that is being dually encoded should be remembered approximately twice as well as information likely to be singly encoded. The best study method for any student is the cued recall of information and specifically associated with this theory is the conceptual peg hypothesis. Students can create questions or simple quizzes after lectures to better learn the information through recall for a better knowledge of the information in the future.

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Take Note, Freshmen: Why Good Note-Taking Skills are Key to Success

By Carrigan Waltz

You’re a freshman in college, so you’ve probably taken notes a time or two in your academic career thus far. You probably think that you’ve got them mastered at this point. But are you actually missing out on important information? Could the way you take notes actually improve your recall of the information? The answer is yes. Taking thorough, well-structured notes can help you recall information better, spend less time studying, and improve your grades in the long run.

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Chunking Through College Stress

By Rhianna Cyr

Freshman year of high school I took the introduction to agriculture class. While in this class we had to memorize the National FFA Creed written by E. M. Tiffany. This creed is made up of 5 short paragraphs describing what it means to be an FFA member and the beliefs of the program, that each member should represent. In order to help us memorize it, my teacher had me and my classmates memorize each paragraph, to recite each week. In other words, week one on Monday, we start memorizing paragraph one, then recite it on Friday. Week two, we memorized paragraph two, to recite on that next Friday, and so on, for five weeks. This process of learning, one paragraph at a time made it much easier to store the creed in long term memory. Later, in my sophomore year of college, I learned the name of this simple process. So, keep reading to find out!