Category: Memory

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Don’t Let Your Brain Interfere With Your Studying

By Will Compton

“For every credit hour you’re enrolled in, you should be spending two or three hours studying outside of the classroom”.

Sheesh, what a nightmarish sentence. Yet, it’s a sentence that most college students have heard before. Speaking from the experience of a junior, I can say with confidence that studying can be cumbersome at any stage of your college career. This is especially true if you have trouble keeping all the information straight in your head. When we’re studying a wealth of information and subjects within close proximity of each other, we tend to experience interference – an incident in which information hinders the recollection of conceptually similar information. There are two types of interference. In proactive interference, previously learned information impedes the retention of new information. In retroactive interference, new information impedes the recall of old information.

Let me help you out with a few tips to avoid this nagging interference.

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Make It About YOU: Learning with the Self-Reference Effect

By Marissa Wurster & Daniel Ilagan

You know how you’re mom told you while you were growing up to stop being selfish and stop making things all about you? Well we’re here to tell you to forget that! In terms of improving memory and encoding items, relating things back to yourself can actually be really helpful! Students spend hours every single day trying to comprehend new material, but often times they waste that time because they fail to relate the material to themselves. Evaluating incoming information relative to the contents of one’s self schema can lead to enhanced elaboration and organization of the newly learned material (1).

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Why You Can’t Trust Your Brain or Anyone Around You

By Robert Dragani and Hannah Kaczala

No college student is a stranger to the stress of exams. But sometimes we get lucky, and after hours of cramming, you might find a question on an exam that you know you studied; you specifically remember it from the study session. You confidently answer and feel accomplished in your study skills. A few weeks later, when your professor finally hands back your graded exam, you are flabbergasted that the question you thought you nailed was marked incorrect. You crack open your textbook, because you’re sure you had it right. The book takes your teacher’s side and you wonder where in your learning you got mixed up. Does this sound familiar to you? If so, you might have fallen victim to what psychologists call the Misinformation Effect.  

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Using Visual Imagery to Improve Memory for College Exams

By Ve’Jhon Johnson and MaryJane Lukas

Your freshman year of college is such an exciting time in your life where you have an opportunity for a fresh start socially, individually and academically. You will be living on your own for the first time in a different environment with complete control over your own life. Just like you will have to adapt to this new environment, you will have to adapt to other parts of college, the academics. So exciting!

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Generating a Better Memory

By Heather Triplett and Patrick Haas

Studying can be something that is hard for students as they begin college. In high school you might have been able to pay attention in class and still get A’s without worrying about studying, or you might have just had to read the text and known everything that was going to be on the test. Yet, as we get older teachers and professors ask more difficult questions and expect you to know more information when it comes to test time. For each class in college your professor will ask you to purchase an expensive textbook, and read a certain chapter from the book to be prepared for class. These topics are no Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows people, these topics are dry definitions with no stories in them. So what can you do to make it easier to retain the information rather than just simply reading your textbook?

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How to Ace Your First College Exams With Dual-Coding

By Rachel Bagha and Theresa Santos

Is a picture really worth a thousand words? We’re not sure – but (mental) pictures can help you pass exams!

College exams are a lot different than the ones you took in high school. This means the methods you use to study for these exams should be different, too. Chances are, in high school, you took a lot of tests that didn’t really require a whole lot of studying. College tests more material over a shorter period of time, which throws off many incoming college freshman who think they can use the same tactics to study for exams than they did in high school. Many students get a wake-up call when they get their first college exam back and don’t do as hot as they thought. Lucky for you, a lot of research has been done on ways to study effectively, so that you can retain information and later apply this information in the future on an exam. You don’t have to wait until you bomb your first exam to start studying effectively. You can start right away – with some of the the dual-coding methods listed below!

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So You Think You Can Study Correctly

By Jordan Feger and Cassandra Gherardini

So you think you know how to study. You think that because high school was such a breeze that you must have stellar study habits and practices, right? You must have it all figured out already, right?

That’s funny.

Welcome to college.

You see, college is hard. No matter where you go or what major you have, college is worlds away from any sort of high school education. All those study methods and habits you thought worked so well don’t exactly compute with the oodles of homework, tests, and term projects piled on your plate.
So you get to college and it feels like your brain is going to explode with all of the tasks you have to complete in addition to actually attending and paying attention in class. It feels like your brain is full; you can’t possibly fit any more information in there.

Well, here’s the thing, that feeling that your brain is full, you have this concept called working memory to thank for that.

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What a Cue Can Do For You

By David Peoples and Madeline Voelker 

Welcome to your first year of college. If you are like me, you are probably wondering how in the world you are going to remember everything you need to know for exams, quizzes, and assignments. Well, the first thing you should know is that remembering is actually a complicated process of re-accessing information that has been stored in your brain. (1) When your brain recalls information it is reconstructing the event by drawing various elements together from different parts of your brain to effectively re-experience the neural activity generated in response to the situation you experienced. (1) Thus, in a sense, your brain is neurally reliving the experience. (1) This probably sounds very technical and complicated. But that is where cued recall comes in to save the day. Cued recall is exactly what the name implies: recollection that is cued. But what does that mean? Put simply, a cue is something that both triggers and assists in the recollection of a memory. (1) But what constitutes a cue? And how can they help in college? Well, anything can be a cue, but we are focusing on those that are directly applicable to your college experience. Therefore, the cues we are focusing on are: taste, location, sound, and written. Continue reading “What a Cue Can Do For You”

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Just Because You’ll Read It, Doesn’t Mean You’ll Remember It

By Daniel Berg and John Clark

So you’ve read the material a few times for your essay exam coming up this week. Scanning through the words, the content is familiar and you think you are gonna ace this exam. Stop and think, especially you freshmen. This isn’t high school anymore. While you may think reading through the material for essay exam three or maybe four times is going to ensure that you get that A, it, in fact, does not. Here’s why.

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Studying Smarter, Not Harder: The Keys to Consolidation

By Cara LaBelle and Niki Bending

Every college freshman struggles with adjusting study habits from high school to college. They go from studying for their finals the night before, and doing well, to studying for a regularly scheduled exam the night before, and failing. Sadly, there is no exact formula for how much or how long you need to study in order to do well. Through our study conducted on consolidation methods, we have discovered some tendencies and tips on how to study more effectively in order to get the desired grade.
           

Disclaimer: Only one exam was failed in the making of this blog post.

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