By Nshimirimana Ezechiele
Introduction:
When you first enter college life becomes a whirlpool of lectures, assignments, quizzes, and exams. In the midst of all of that chaos you have to continuously attempt to retain large amounts of information for things such as a quiz, an essay, or an exam. Although there are many ways to go about remembering one of the techniques that can be used is Maintenance Rehearsal.
What is Maintenance rehearsal?
Maintenance rehearsal is pretty much as its name suggests. It is the process of repeatedly rehearsing information in a short-term memory without any meaningful processing or connections to existing knowledge” [1] The Atkinson and Shiffrin memory model describes it best as something that simply roams in your head till it is time to use it. An example of this includes things like remembering a phone number regardless of how bad you want to keep it in your head most likely after it’s served its purpose you won’t remember it much after [2]. This is part of the phonological loop and is seen as the first step which is taking verbal information in and keeping it in your head temporarily before it gets lost or is stored [3]. Along with that while preparing for a test normally one will repeat the information to retain it just long enough to pass the test, after that the knowledge is like it never existed.This skill is used by pretty much everyone at some point in their life but now more than ever you may find yourself needing it.
Elaboration: The process of developing or presenting a theory, policy, or system in further detail. (from dictionary.com)
I can imagine that we all have had this conversation at least once, maybe in high school or college. Maybe it was for a different subject, but the need to cram is the same. We have busy lives as future and current undergraduates.