Cognitive Psychology in Education
By Aileen Tierney and Erin McQuitty
Picture this: You’re trying to study for your first college exam, but your phone keeps buzzing. You try to answer texts and check your notifications while also reading your textbook in between. You think you have a handle on your studies because of this multitasking, but when it’s time to take your test, you realize you don’t remember anything you read about before. Why?!
Continue reading “Please Give Me Your Divided Attention: Multitasking While Studying”
By Olivia Arnold and Ashley Gottardo
The transition to college can be a rough period for most students, ripe with a new school, new friends, and a new sense of independence. Through all of these new experiences one realizes many areas of their life change in ways they didn’t expect- namely in their approach to studying. This is more of a forced change, and in order to succeed you will likely have to actively make it on your own. Lucky for you, we’re here to explain what areas may benefit the most from change, help you cope with your changing study habits, and give you tips for how to succeed in college.
Continue reading “Low-Load vs. High-Load: How Distractions Really Affect Your Studying Habits”
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!
Continue reading “Using Visual Imagery to Improve Memory for College Exams”
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?
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!
Continue reading “How to Ace Your First College Exams With Dual-Coding”
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.
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”
By Malika Handa and Roselee Ledesma
Okay so you made it to college! You will be starting in the fall, but now you have AP tests, final exams, high school graduation, and perhaps a summer job that awaits since you are saving for your future (or should be…). Well, congratulations you are going to college! Yes, starting college is a very big deal! I was definitely encouraged to dream big, so naturally I had to plan big and for that I had to think big . . . big, big, big! What if we use small steps to achieve big plans? “Small” and practical steps can be more manageable for you.
When thinking about problem-solving it is important to recognize that there is a difference in the way experts and novices solve problems. Novices are people who are inexperienced in a field of study, just like college students who are starting to build their expertise. If you consider yourself a novice, this is for you!
Continue reading “‘Expert-ology’: A Novice’s Guide to Problem-Solving”
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.
Continue reading “Just Because You’ll Read It, Doesn’t Mean You’ll Remember It”
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.
Continue reading “Studying Smarter, Not Harder: The Keys to Consolidation”