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.
For first-year college students, the transition from high school to college can be challenging, especially when the ways of studying and learning begin to change. Luckily, there are beneficial ways of improving and overcoming these challenges if we understand the concept of load theory of attention. Do not fear, it is not as complicated as it may seem, and will change the way you think about studying!
The use of Dual Coding in essence is using imagery and labeling it with a word which in turn helps you remember the word or the image one sees for the first time, and it should turn into a long-term memory. But how can we use dual coding in our freshman year in college, well depending where you go you may end up taking a class of learning a new language for extracurricular, something fun you may have a trip in mind to go to and you want to learn the language before you head out to that specific country in case the locals or the signs don’t have the language you speak. Would be awful if you get stranded in a country without knowing the language, and what would you do if your phone dies google translate won’t be translating nothing if you can’t speak at least a broken version of the country’s native language. But how does this correlate with learning a language in class or even on your own time.
For memories, learning how to process and organize them is great for when we want to do well at work, at school, or even with relationships. When it comes to processing your memories, it starts with your working memory, and depending on how you memorize and use your working memory affects what then becomes stored. To completely utilize the working memory, you have to use it to its full capacity, which also includes using the best method to encode the things in working memory so that they are able to be processed into your long-term memory store. One of the best methods to use is chunking, where you ‘chunk’ the things that are similar that you want to remember together. There are about four chunks that can go into working memory before you start to forget things (1) and so then comes the encoding to process those memories from working memory into your long-term memory.
Hey, there! If you’re reading this, then you are probably a first-year college student overwhelmed during syllabus week and thinking: “There is no chance I survive freshman year.” You’re thinking back to high school and reminiscing on how easy your classes were and how you spent nights before tests (when they were still called tests, and not “exams,” which is somehow much more intimidating), which you spent playing Fortnite, not cramming a semester’s worth of content in preparation for a final. Your high school teachers, parents, freshman orientation leader, and probably your TikTok “For You Page” have all most likely thrown a lot of studying hacks and advice at you, but you may still feel unprepared for the courseload you’re taking on, and unsure of how you’re going to balance 16 credit hours, Greek life, homesickness, and a social life. Do not fear! Here is a quick and simple guide on how to understand use the psychological concept of encoding to get the most out of your studying. Happy reading! Good luck with your freshman year!
When people first get to college, most kids do not know how to study. Some kids come into college homeschooled, some did not go to a public school while others went to a school where they did not have to study for hard tests/exams. Incoming freshmen wanting to go to college are blindsided when it comes to how much studying really affects how well someone does in college. Coming to college has made me realize how much studying you have to do. Knowing how to study the right way is something that has helped tremendously while being in college. College is a scary thing but knowing how to study the right way and pass your classes will make college so much easier in the future.
The Spacing Effect and how it works
Just hearing the word Spacing effect when it comes to studying may scare some students off and they will probably look past it like it is nothing, but it is very important. The Spacing Effect, when it comes to studying, is one of the earliest discoveries in human learning (1). It is proven that if a student spaces out their studying and processes what they are learning, they will remember and learn the information and memorize it better (1). For example, if you have a big exam coming up, it is better for you to take breaks throughout the time you are studying to help understand the information more.
Survival value (also known as adaptive value and connection to survival processing) is understanding memory and how memory is used to survive which leads to survival processing that encodes items into our memory(1)! Survival value leads to enhanced memory by relating words to situations that others have not experienced (the apocalypse!!!) This works because when we relate words to our survival, we are linking to something meaningful that will stick in our minds(2). In cognitive psychology, survival value refers to the adaptive benefit of certain cognitive processes or behaviors that assist one’s survival.
