By Michelle Knepp
Congratulations! You’ve made it to college! A whole new adventure stretches in front of you. New friends, fun times, and oh yeah, that dreaded word, TESTS. You have probably developed some system of studying while in high school. Maybe that has worked well for you, OR maybe it hasn’t. One of the challenges new college students face is the AMOUNT of information they are asked to learn in a short time. How are you going to learn all that information and RETAIN it for the test? Researchers have learned that HOW information is learned and put into our long-term memory is very important! This is called ENCODING. Using VISUAL IMAGES to get information into our long-term memory can be a real benefit when trying to RETRIEVE that information later. When we retrieve information, we are taking it out of our long-term memory and putting it into our working memory (1). This can is very helpful at test time! Continue reading “I Can Only Imagine—Using Visual Imagery to Get That A”