Tag: cognitive psychology

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Seeing Without Seeing? Imagine That!

By Kate Aukes

Welcome to college! The next four (or more) years may be some of the most interesting and fun of your life, but a good work-fun balance is important. You will likely find yourself spending some time working on your study strategies as you settle into a new routine and a new school. When it comes to studying the material that you’ve learned and remembering it when test-day arrives, visual imagery will likely be at play. This type of imagery can be very helpful to your performance on exams and your overall studying method. When I started college, my study habits tended to be lacking, and that reflected in some of my grades. As a senior, I can look back and see that my habits have improved greatly over the years and my grades have followed suit. My hope is that this post can help you learn from my mistakes and do well in your first year of college!

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Recall issues? Learn about Interference

Interference may be why you did poorly on your test

By Miranda Molleck

“Did you fail your first college exam? Its okay! Just breathe and keep reading.”

College can sure be rough. You have classes to attend, homework (papers, presentations, assignments), groups presentations, plus studying. You have to balance a lot. Its no wonder students run into interference issues.

“Oh, what is interference? Keep reading my post to find out. There are ways to help reduce the likelihood of interference.”

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Test Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself (or Your GPA)

By Anna Rule

We all have the best of intentions when it comes to preparing for an exam, am I right?  I mean – no one sees a test date on a syllabus and says, “Okay I’m going to wing that one.”  We study, we prepare, and we pray to the founding fathers of Eureka College that they grant us some semblance of a working memory to recall the information when we need it.  While our intentions may be great, we need to ask the question; are we preparing effectively?  While we’re cramming our brains with information, how do we know it will stick?

In my years of studying for tests, it never occurred to me that re-reading my notes wasn’t sufficient.  I thought that because I was going through the material, it would be fresh in my mind and “learned.”  Some can get by on this wildly common practice.  Others (like myself) are not blessed with the good memorization gene.  So, what can you do?  Test yourself.  Of course, this is in conjunction with the wise words of Alan, trusty wolf-pack leader, to ‘check yourself.’  But for the sake of retaining information long-term – stick with the first recommendation and test yourself.

In all seriousness, our academic experiences thus far have allowed us to safely assume that everyone learns in different ways.  Some are visual learners, some learn by doing.  Some are extremely lucky and skim over a note or two and ace a test (I am extremely envious of those people).  One review of how we learn carves out a solid list of 8 effective learning strategies backed by a ton of research (1) which you can view here.  We’re going to dive into one of those 8.  Let’s see how we can retain more by testing ourselves.

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Elaborative Rehearsal, But You Already Knew That!

By Kaci Kingman

 Introduction

Are you a new college freshman and are you freaking out because you just cannot seem to remember things like you used to be able to in high school? Well, you are not alone! Most freshman are going to have problems adjusting to how to correctly study the new material in college. You are not going to be able to remember everything you study, even if thats how you rolled in high school. You need to find a balance between a more in depth approach and a more shallow approach(1). You need to figure out if what you are trying to learn needs to be put into your brain for a long time or not. This will help you in determining how you should study the new information. If you need to make information stay in your brain for a long time, boy do I have an answer for you! Have you ever wondered why you can keep repeating the same thing over and over in your head to try and remember it, just to forget it a few minutes later? Yeah, stop doing that! That is not how you are going to succeed in college, but don’t freak out to much, I have your back. I have a way better way for you to memorize things and it’s called elaborative rehearsal!

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Solving Problems With Problems

By Kali George

Picture this: You’re in your first abnormal psychology class learning about endless psychological disorders, and possible diagnoses. Your brain is cluttered with new information and you’re not sure how you’re going to recall it for your first test. Come time for test day you’re struggling to remember examples of obsessive compulsive behaviors, but sure enough you remember a prime example that your professor had given you on the famous show, Hoarders. Without a doubt you are able to use the analogy in order to remember the original concept discussed in class.

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What is your learning style?

By Susanna Getz

Before I tell you what your learning style is I want you to STOP and think of what “you think your learning style is”. Okay, now you need to throw all that crap about learning styles out the window. Sorry to lie to you, but you will not find out what your learning style is because this concept is a myth. As real as unicorns and fairies. Complete bullshit!

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Meditation for general focusing and stress relief

By Collin Aimone

Everyone has had the issue of being stressed and has experienced trouble when trying to focus. A lot of times this is seen in school as the regular pressures of a learning environment can weigh heavy on the student. The amount of stress a student may endure can sometimes go unnoticed, and this stress soon leads to trouble focusing which in return can lead to falling grades. It has most likely been presented to all of us before as a solution to our problems, meditating, but of course we would not take the time to sit in our rooms and cross our legs and find our happy place. However, studies have shown that meditation can induce a physiological state of momentary deep rest, which has shown proof of lowering stress levels and helping individuals focus better. Continue reading “Meditation for general focusing and stress relief”

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Test Better Using the Testing Effect

By Sydney Abdnour

We’ve all heard the saying “you get out what you put in.” This statement applies perfectly to schooling, specifically studying and test taking. In high school, it is easy to cram the night before a test and get a good grade. Unfortunately, that is not the case in college. Even if you consider yourself a “good test taker,” it is important to put more time into your studies than you did in high school. There are many techniques out there to enhance the learning and studying experience for students of all ages. One of the effective ways to help students (especially college students) study and retain information better is the Testing Effect, known more commonly as the Retrieval Practice Effect.

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Only three steps and you’re master of elaboration!

By Hikaru Sanouchi

Elaboration: The process of developing or presenting a theory, policy, or system in further detail. (from dictionary.com)

The word elaboration is from the late Latin word, elaborationem. Labor played an important role in the word elaboration, as we can physically see the word “labor” in this word. When we imagine the word labor, we would imagine labor work, which is physically hard work people do, for instance yard work, construction, and such. Currently, elaboration means to work out a problem in more detail and depth.

That is it for elaborating on the word elaboration. Here, I’m going talk about using elaboration in psychology.  Elaboration is the process of incorporating new information with an old idea. According to Yang (1995), a goal of elaboration is to, “make learning more meaningful by forming a relationship between the new, unfamiliar material and the new the older, already learned information” (Yang. 1995. P,3). Creating a connection between your new knowledge and old knowledge to understand the information in more depth is the goal (1).

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