Tag: memory

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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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Chunk Your Life Together

By Laken Barlow

Congratulations! You’re going to college! Or you may already be there, still good for you. Going and getting into college is an important milestone in many people’s lives. It prepares you for your future career. College is also a time to figure out who you are as a person and to help you grow. It can be intimidating sometimes, I’m not going to lie. You’re put in a completely new environment where you have to make new friendships and completely start over in sports and other organizations. You have to create a positive image of yourself to your peers, all the while under the pressure of doing well in your classes. The whole reason you came to college is to prepare yourself for your future, so you need to learn how to balance out your social and academic life. A key component to managing your academic work is your study habits.

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It’s Not a Generation Thing: The Generation Effect

By Sydni Neal

The Generation Effect

For individuals wishing to improve their grades on tests and quizzes, the generation effect may come in handy. The generation effect, an effective memory strategy which allows an individual to remember information better, is rather simple to take advantage of. The generation effect is simply the act of creating, or generating, information and materials that an individual needs to remember in order to enhance the process of encoding within the memory. However, according to research, the effectiveness and usefulness of the generation effect is different depending on the situation, but, as a whole, is an effect study method.

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How to Ace Your First College Exams With Dual-Coding

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!

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So You Think You Can Study Correctly

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.

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What a Cue Can Do For You

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”

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Studying Smarter, Not Harder: The Keys to Consolidation

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.

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Stress Well to Test Well? How Applying State Dependent Learning Can Lead to Better Test Results

By Nina Relias and Madeline Rockhold

Ever heard of the expressions “dress well to test well” or “I only study well when I am under a lot of stress”?  Most college students have their own theories or myths about their study habits which may or may not be accurate. We will be addressing these myths by exploring the nature of state dependent memory and learning.  Psychologists have determined that outside factors influence how one studies.  By definition, state dependent learning is a type of learning that is associated with a specific state.  People have better memory recall when information is retrieved in the same state that it was learned in. Especially when referring to mood. This occurs because human’s brains are comprised of a network of interconnected units or nodes, which activate other surrounding emotional nodes. These nodes are connected to certain events and stimuli in one’s environment that are associated with a specific emotion.  These emotions are spread to other association nodes that then are able to interpret stored information along the pathway of activation with more accessibility (1).  In short, someone will have better memory retrieval if that person’s mood or physical state is the same at both encoding and retrieval.

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All-Nighters? No, Head to Bed!

By Amber Zander and Melissa Gannon

It’s not uncommon for college students to pull all-nighters the night before a big exam. They either forgot about the exam and have no choice but to stay up all night and study or are so nervous that they’d rather study than sleep. Students try to stay up into the late hours of the night, attempting to remember every detail on their study guides, flipping through their flashcards over and over again. Before they realize it, its 8 am, and they decide to call it quits and grab the closest source of caffeine just to have some energy to make it through the exam. Throughout the exam, they find themselves struggling to remember the information they spent all night studying. They’re fatigued and although they try their best to remember, the information just isn’t coming to them. Weeks later students receive their results from the exam, only to find that their grade didn’t match the amount of effort put into studying for it. Continue reading “All-Nighters? No, Head to Bed!”