college study skills – Cognition in Class

April 27, 2026April 28, 2026

Constantly studying but still lost? Well, organization might be the key to your solution

By: Chloe Pluger

Introduction

Have you ever stayed up hours on end studying: rereading the notes, writing everything down, even pulling an all nighter to open the test and thinking your still going to fail.

It’s very annoying when you know you put all that effort into studying. The issue is though the problem might not be how much you were studying all that information it could be the way you organized what you were learning.

While in college theres so much going on multiple classes, different deadlines, sports, and other responsibilities. Without having a clear schedule all the information you are told could start to come together or you could forget it. Now this is when cognitive psychology comes into play.

This post will be going over how organization affects memory, why your brain relies on structure to process the information, and how you can apply simple, research-backed strategies so you are able to change the bad study habits into more organized and effective ways to recall the information.

April 27, 2026April 28, 2026

How much Space? – Spacing Effect

By: Natallie Tobuk

Thinking back to my time as a freshman in college, I think that my advice to myself would be to rethink how I study for tests. I think that cramming for a test can be successful on occasion but doing it all the time will make your life more stressful than it needs to be. Procrastination was a method that I relied on throughout high school for assignments and even studying for tests and exams. Now that I have been in college for three years, I know that though I am a busy person, it is not effective and causes a lot of unnecessary stress. By rethinking how you study, you too can save yourself a lot of stressful nights and mornings by using the spacing effect to make your study sessions more effective.

April 26, 2026April 27, 2026

Study Smarter, Not Harder: How “Levels of Processing” Can Change the Way You Learn

By: Braylon Boyer

If I could go back to my first year of college, I wouldn’t tell myself to study more, I would tell myself to study differently. Like most students I thought college was cramming everything to the night before exams and reread notes a million times. It felt productive, but the results didn’t always match my effort.

A concept that changes how we think about studying from cognitive psychology is Levels of Processing. Once you understand it, you stop wasting time on useless strategies and start using ones that work.

April 26, 2026April 27, 2026

The Hidden Study Method Your Brain Uses Without You

By: Jayden Crowder

Have you ever seen a term on a test and thought, “I’ve definitely seen this before,” even if you couldn’t fully explain it? That feeling isn’t random, it’s your brain using something called repetition priming. And even though it usually happens automatically, you can actually design your studying around it. Most students think learning only happens when they sit down and focus, but cognitive psychology shows that your brain is constantly learning from repeated exposure, even when you’re not trying. Repetition priming is one of the clearest examples of this.

What Is Repetition Priming?

Repetition priming happens when your brain processes something faster or more easily simply because you’ve seen it before. It doesn’t require conscious effort. In fact, it’s part of what psychologists call implicit memory, which works without you actively trying to remember anything. Research shows that when a stimulus, like a word or concept, is repeated, your brain becomes more efficient at processing it later, even if you don’t consciously remember seeing it before (1). This is why a vocabulary word looks more familiar the second time you see it, or why a concept starts to feel easier after repeated exposure. Your brain isn’t just remembering it’s becoming more efficient.

April 26, 2026April 27, 2026

Wait… Did That Actually Happen?

How Your Memory Can Be Rewritten and What to Do About It

By: Railynn Brown

Introduction

Have you ever been talking with a friend about something that happened, and suddenly your memory of it starts to change? Maybe you were completely sure about what you saw or learned, but then someone describes it a little differently, and now you’re second-guessing yourself. This actually happened to me during my first year of college when I was studying with a group and realized later that something I “remembered” for the exam was completely wrong.

Picture this: you’re talking with a friend about something that happened last week, and they confidently say, “Remember when that car sped through the stop sign?” You pause. You thought the car just rolled through it, but now you’re not so sure. As it turns out, the way someone describes something after the fact can actually change how you remember it.

In this post, I’m going to break down the misinformation effect and source monitoring errors in a way that actually connects to your experience as a college student. Once you understand how easily your memory can be influenced, it becomes a lot easier to avoid studying the wrong thing and walking into an exam feeling confident only to be disappointed with the results.

April 26, 2026April 27, 2026

Way of studying; Relating words to survival value

By: Joshua Stanley

Studying for classes or a test can be stressful at times, and prevent you from fully understanding the full material. Even when you prepare for a big exam you may not remember everything you studied and that can lead to an unwanted grade. A way to make your studying easier is by relating words or information to survival value. Doing this will make studying more effective because it taps into how human memory naturally works.

Our brains are wired to prioritise information that seems important for survival, so when something feels relevant to staying alive or solving real-life problems, the brain processes it more deeply and remembers it better. For example, instead of trying to memorize vocabulary or facts you can ask yourself how that information might help you in a real life situation, that way the information comes easier to remember because you related it to a real world experience. Say you were studying biology terms, you should think about how knowing them could help you identify or understand an illness.

April 26, 2026April 27, 2026

The Study Hack You Need: Chunking

By: Cole Smith

When I was in High School, I found myself studying for tests the night before and cramming all the material into one night study sessions. Once I got into college, I realized my prior study habits would not get me far , given how challenging the courses can be. Little did I know that the key to studying was actually something I had been doing since I was 6 years old! When you were a kid, did the story of your parents making you memorize their phone number or a street address by learning each part sound familiar? If it does, well then, you are already familiar with the concept of chunking! Splitting up the numbers in your parents’ phone number and memorizing each section, or by splitting up your street address and memorizing the number, street, and zip code separately, and then putting it all together, is a prime example of how chunking information works (1)!

April 26, 2026April 28, 2026

Understanding Versus Memorizing; Why Elaboration Is Better

By: Courtney Hart

Have you ever crammed for a test and immediately forgot what it is you learned afterwards. This is something I struggled with when first getting into college. I would study right before a test or some important assignment. I would get the topic down for the short period of time that I needed it but then when I try to recall it after a longer period. It was hard for me to remember, I used to blame my memory being bad, but I have come to realize it is just the way I was studying that was the problem. Well, that is because I was not trying to understand the information but just memorize it. One of the better ways to study is to understand. And that is exactly what the purpose of elaboration is. Elaboration is a technique that I learned that has helped me study and succeed within the learning environment.

April 25, 2026April 27, 2026

Retrieval Practice: Learning that Lasts

By: Joshua Frenden

Introduction

Got a big test coming up? Need to learn something that you’ll be able to remember long term? Retrieval practice might become your new best friend. “Practicing retrieval yields significantly greater long-term retention of the studied materials than just restudying them” (Moreira et al., 2026). This method of retrieval is something that many, including myself, have found to be a very “effective… learning strategy” (Moreira et al., 2026). With the goal of “familiarity and recollection” in mind, retrieval practice might be the study method that you have been missing out on.

April 28, 2025April 28, 2025

“Why I Forgot Stuff During the Test After Studying Really Hard”

By Walter Medrano

Have you ever studied really hard for a test, but when you sit down to take it, your mind just blanks out and you notice that you’re not as confident as you were while studying? That’s happened to me more than once. I’d study in my dorm, feel super confident, and then get to the classroom and suddenly forget everything. I used to think it was just nerves or stress, but it turns out there’s actually a reason this happens, and it’s called the encoding specificity principle. It may sound scary at first but it’s actually pretty cool once you understand it.