Category: Memory

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Go Test Yourself – Serial Position and Testing Effect

By Jeileen Belen and Veronica Rzepniewski

College is a difficult time for people; you’re adjusting to a new environment, taking difficult classes, and surrounding yourself with people that you don’t know yet. Though it may seem stressful, college is a great time as long as you find your balance.

If I could go back in time, I would have listened to older college students who told me that the techniques used for studying in high school is not an effective way to study in college. To all of the first-year college students, the best way to study for a test is to ACTUALLY STUDY; studying the day before or the day of is a sure way to fail a college test. There are expectations of college students to have a fun and active social life while maintaining a good academic standing, and these expectations can be overwhelming. It is important to enjoy your college years, but it is more important to understand your boundaries and find a good social and academic balance. Sources say that having good study skills improves academic self-efficacy and achievement motivation which are the two constructs that best influence GPA (1). College is a whole new ball park, so developing great study habits from the bat will help you succeed. Continue reading “Go Test Yourself – Serial Position and Testing Effect”

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Stress Well to Test Well? How Applying State Dependent Learning Can Lead to Better Test Results

By Nina Relias and Madeline Rockhold

Ever heard of the expressions “dress well to test well” or “I only study well when I am under a lot of stress”?  Most college students have their own theories or myths about their study habits which may or may not be accurate. We will be addressing these myths by exploring the nature of state dependent memory and learning.  Psychologists have determined that outside factors influence how one studies.  By definition, state dependent learning is a type of learning that is associated with a specific state.  People have better memory recall when information is retrieved in the same state that it was learned in. Especially when referring to mood. This occurs because human’s brains are comprised of a network of interconnected units or nodes, which activate other surrounding emotional nodes. These nodes are connected to certain events and stimuli in one’s environment that are associated with a specific emotion.  These emotions are spread to other association nodes that then are able to interpret stored information along the pathway of activation with more accessibility (1).  In short, someone will have better memory retrieval if that person’s mood or physical state is the same at both encoding and retrieval.

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All-Nighters? No, Head to Bed!

By Amber Zander and Melissa Gannon

It’s not uncommon for college students to pull all-nighters the night before a big exam. They either forgot about the exam and have no choice but to stay up all night and study or are so nervous that they’d rather study than sleep. Students try to stay up into the late hours of the night, attempting to remember every detail on their study guides, flipping through their flashcards over and over again. Before they realize it, its 8 am, and they decide to call it quits and grab the closest source of caffeine just to have some energy to make it through the exam. Throughout the exam, they find themselves struggling to remember the information they spent all night studying. They’re fatigued and although they try their best to remember, the information just isn’t coming to them. Weeks later students receive their results from the exam, only to find that their grade didn’t match the amount of effort put into studying for it. Continue reading “All-Nighters? No, Head to Bed!”

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Why You Should Forget Everything You Learned About Studying

By Henry Schimmel and Brennan McGuire

Deep-rooted high school study habits tend to die hard in college if they are not swiftly corrected. One of the greatest challenges new college students face is abandoning their traditional methods of rereading and memorizing class material when preparing for an exam. While these study techniques may have yielded positive results in the high school classroom, they simply won’t suffice in the rigorous domain of higher education. However, it is never too late to change your study habits. You might be pleasantly surprised by the extent to which changing your study routine can improve your academic performance and overall retention of information. While it can be a daunting and arduous task to modify your existing study paradigm, by utilizing the simple method of retrieval practice, you can significantly improve long-term understanding and performance.

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Professors Hate This Study Method: How Wearing a Zumba Suit and Binging On Kahlúa Improved Exam Scores

By Christopher Forte and Shantell Brusse

So your class has just taken a difficult calculus exam. Amongst the crowd of people leaving the classroom are expressions of relief, profound joy and confidence. There is a light at the end of everyone’s tunnel, except for you. You stagger outside the classroom in complete astonishment, run into Walgreens to buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s half-baked cookie dough paradise and proceed to crawl in bed to withdraw from such a cruel world.

The following week is spent in wallowing as the inevitable test grade is posted onto D2L and your dreams of leading an armada of food trucks are foolishly, however temporarily, put into question. Assuming that there are no perfect people on Earth, such a failure may lead to a short-lived, higher ingestion of alcohol. More days pass and you break out of your drunken spree only to realize that it is the day of the next calculus exam. A short review of the notes and you find yourself sitting in the same classroom where the exam review took place several days before. Still slightly inebriated, the exam is completed and turned back to the TA. The surprise of your life is posted on D2L as you score higher than you ever have before in the class.

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Say No to Maintenance, Say Yes to Elaborative!

By Angelica Otto and Fatema Atshan

“Sorry, I can’t go out. I have a HUGE cognition exam, and I haven’t even started studying.”

“Well, when is it?”

“TOMORROW”

I can imagine that we all have had this conversation at least once, maybe in high school or college. Maybe it was for a different subject, but the need to cram is the same. We have busy lives as future and current undergraduates.

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Maximizing Study Results with Transfer-Appropriate Processing

By Ellie Marston and Emily Topp

Studying can be overwhelming, but sometimes notecards can be useful, depending on the processing your exam requires.

ATTENTION COLLEGE STUDENTS, would you like to get more ‘bang’ for your studying ‘buck?’ Picture this: you’re sitting in an exam and can’t remember the answer to a question you know you studied the night before. What if you could improve your ability to retrieve information you studied the night before? We have the answer, and it just requires that you focus on the way you process information while studying. The best part is: it doesn’t even require that you study longer, just smarter.

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Efficient Encoding is the Secret to Success in College

By Makayla Bradley and Catherine Cunningham

When you’re a college freshman, you’re a bundle of emotions and have a million thoughts about what college is going to be like, running through your mind. We can safely assume that not one of these thoughts is centered around studying and getting good grades, which is a huge mistake. Before you know it, you’ll be eyeballs deep in readings, homework, papers, and tests, with no tools in your toolbox to combat the endless work you’re going to face. Many freshmen enter college not prepared for work they’ll be asked to complete and the difficulty of college exams. Although there isn’t much you can do to change the amount of work you’ll encounter, you can do something about the way you study for the exams.

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Memory Errors and You: Navigating College with a (Sometimes) Deceptive Mind

By Trevor Foster and Emily Wilson

So, you’re an incoming college freshman; if you are like most people your age, you will be entering into a completely new environment – both socially and academically. In such periods of drastic change, you might notice yourself beginning to not do as well in school as you’ve grown accustomed to, or you might find yourself forgetting things more often with this newfound freedom. Some of these changes might be due to errors in memory. A 1988 study by W. Scott Terry found that among the most commonly forgotten things are forgetting to deviate from your habits and forgetting to do some future task (1). However, memory errors cover much more than simply forgetting! This blog post will introduce some of the most common types of memory errors, and it will offer some possible tips on avoiding them.

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Slow and Steady Wins the Race—Distributed vs. Massed Practice

By Keely Smith and Melanie Hernandez

Picture this. It is late August. Tomorrow is the day that you leave your hometown to move into your college dorm. You cannot contain your excitement. You are going to your dream school. This is the moment you have waited for all summer. But, you realize that you are a little worried. Numerous questions run through your head. What if college is much harder than high school? What if you do not get the same good grades that you always used to? What if you do not maintain the GPA you need in order to keep your scholarship? What if you disappoint your parents? If this sounds like you, then you have found your way to the right blog—we are here to offer you Cognitive Psychology’s best advice for successful learning and studying in college.

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