Tag: study tips

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Elaborative Rehearsal, But You Already Knew That!

By Kaci Kingman

 Introduction

Are you a new college freshman and are you freaking out because you just cannot seem to remember things like you used to be able to in high school? Well, you are not alone! Most freshman are going to have problems adjusting to how to correctly study the new material in college. You are not going to be able to remember everything you study, even if thats how you rolled in high school. You need to find a balance between a more in depth approach and a more shallow approach(1). You need to figure out if what you are trying to learn needs to be put into your brain for a long time or not. This will help you in determining how you should study the new information. If you need to make information stay in your brain for a long time, boy do I have an answer for you! Have you ever wondered why you can keep repeating the same thing over and over in your head to try and remember it, just to forget it a few minutes later? Yeah, stop doing that! That is not how you are going to succeed in college, but don’t freak out to much, I have your back. I have a way better way for you to memorize things and it’s called elaborative rehearsal!

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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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Music While Studying: Does It Motivate Or Distract?

By Marissa Corder

Can music help you study more efficiently? Unfortunately, this question is not easy to answer, and research has yielded contradictory evidence. The effect of music on cognitive performance depends on a multitude of factors including tempos of songs, types of cognitive tasks being performed (such as reading comprehension or solving algebra problems), and prior listening experiences. The arousal and mood hypothesis proposes that music’s influence on cognitive performance is a result of physiological responses (1). This hypothesis was developed to explain the “Mozart effect” – the popular misconception that listening to Mozart makes you smarter; that is, after Mozart-listening sessions, participants scored higher on spatial abilities compared to silent conditions or listening to instructions on relaxation (2). Later research found supporting evidence for the arousal and mood hypothesis and thus, “busted” the erroneous conclusion of a causal relationship between music and intelligence.

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Make It About YOU: Learning with the Self-Reference Effect

By Marissa Wurster & Daniel Ilagan

You know how you’re mom told you while you were growing up to stop being selfish and stop making things all about you? Well we’re here to tell you to forget that! In terms of improving memory and encoding items, relating things back to yourself can actually be really helpful! Students spend hours every single day trying to comprehend new material, but often times they waste that time because they fail to relate the material to themselves. Evaluating incoming information relative to the contents of one’s self schema can lead to enhanced elaboration and organization of the newly learned material (1).

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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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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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Say No to Maintenance, Say Yes to Elaborative!

By Angelica Otto and Fatema Atshan

“Sorry, I can’t go out. I have a HUGE cognition exam, and I haven’t even started studying.”

“Well, when is it?”

“TOMORROW”

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.

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Maximizing Study Results with Transfer-Appropriate Processing

By Ellie Marston and Emily Topp

Studying can be overwhelming, but sometimes notecards can be useful, depending on the processing your exam requires.

ATTENTION COLLEGE STUDENTS, would you like to get more ‘bang’ for your studying ‘buck?’ Picture this: you’re sitting in an exam and can’t remember the answer to a question you know you studied the night before. What if you could improve your ability to retrieve information you studied the night before? We have the answer, and it just requires that you focus on the way you process information while studying. The best part is: it doesn’t even require that you study longer, just smarter.

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