elaboration – Cognition in Class

April 27, 2025April 28, 2025

Clarity: Making Sense of Your Mind in College

By Jordyn Coppejans

Elaborate is what we constantly hear. Did you know we have a great elaborate machine in our brain that takes up what we experience and combines it? Our mind reconstructs what we experience and makes it different, but still lets us retrieve the right information for a deeper understanding of knowledge, like collage.

First, let’s dive into Elaborative Rehearsal, which uses meanings and connections to help transfer information to long-term memory. “Generating questions makes you think hard about the material and fosters comprehension (B. Wong,1995). Additionally, answering questions such as “Why is this true? Or what parts of this page are new to me? will help you to learn because it connects what you are learning to what you already know.” (Putnam et al.,2016) Looking at that quote, you can see that comprehension is done by connections and not just by memorizing information.

April 26, 2024May 1, 2024

Using Elaboration as a Cognitive Approach for Helpful Studying

By Emma Sandlin

It is quite difficult to start college. There are several issues that must be resolved, the most important of which being how to comprehend and absorb the content in the best possible way. One of the many worries that accompany beginning college is learning how to use elaboration when studying new material. According to cognitive psychologists, elaboration is a very useful technique for enhancing learning and memory retention (1). Elaboration is the process of bringing new information to life by connecting it to what has already been learned or by creating meaningful connections. Students can improve their comprehension and retain more information by using the elaborative encoding method. Study skills mastery is essential to achieving academic brilliance. Elaboration is shown to be an effective tactic for boosting understanding, fortifying memory retention, and encouraging in-depth learning (1). Elaboration makes study sessions more lively by enticing students to actively interact with the content, draw connections, and develop ideas (2). Students that integrate elaborative processing into their study regimens open the door to an abundance of knowledge that is just waiting to be discovered and comprend (3).

April 30, 2023March 12, 2024

The Imagination of Elaboration

By Katelynn Tripp

When in the process of studying, it may feel common for you to try different strategies for obtaining the information. When we use our current knowledge and try to connect the dots on certain topics, this can be seen as elaboration. Elaboration is a core technique when learning new information because it allows us to retract previous learned knowledge, and use it to our advantage when trying to learn new information. This technique can be used in any subject, as we all have some knowledge on random things in this life. Without the skill of elaboration, I feel people would struggle with learning information. Even though this technique doesn’t determine our capabilities of learning, it does improve the likelihood of us obtaining that information. In this report, I will be explaining what the meaning of elaboration is, and some of the key techniques that go into this topic as well.