Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young!
There has been a lot of research about how people learn and how they learn best in higher education contexts. There are thousands of theories and principles that have emerged over the years to attempt to inform and guide tutors, lecturers and learners as to how best to orientate themselves towards their education and their learning tasks.
They Fight Back Against Forgetting
The moment you acquire new information is the moment that forgetting starts trying to take it away. Unfortunately, you can’t stop forgetting anymore than you can stop wind from blowing. But you can fight it back, this is what top students do, reinforcing what they have learned and strengthening their memories in the face of forgetting’s relentless attack.
Top Students Retain Information
There’s a battle going on in the brain. You may not always be aware of it, but your memory is under constant assault from forgetfulness, the biggest single enemy of your academic success. Forgetting works both massively and rapidly to undo learning. In fact, research has shown again and again that when you learn something new you are likely to forget most of it in a matter of days.
In one experiment, people who read a textbook chapter, forgot 46 percent of their reading after one day, 79 percent after fourteen days, and 81 percent after twenty-eight days.
Although reading is forgotten quickly, the rate of forgetting for things you hear occurs even faster. This has to do with the way the short-term or working memory is designed. All new information passes through working memory before some of it is sent on to more permanent storage in your long-term memory. Your working memory essentially has two front doors. There’s an entrance for the things you see and another for the things you say or hear. Solid evidence suggests that when you read words in a book, you are both seeing and hearing them at once. Images of the words combined with the sounds of those words that you hear in your “inner ear” makes the memories stronger.
The best way to make memories stick, the best way to move what you have learned from your working memory to your long-term memory is through rehearsal. The word rehearse comes from an old French word that means “to plow again.” Each time you repeat or rewrite what you’ve read or heard, you’re rehearsing it; you are deepening and strengthening its memory trace, this is How Top Students Study. If you plow deeply, it should last. But if you only plow a shallow path, it can vanish in the first heavy wind or driving rain. It’s the same with unrehearsed information.
Top Students Make an Effort to Remember
Memory is not automatic. To remember something, you have to make a conscious effort to learn it. Even if you do learn new information, it won’t stay with you very long unless you’re convinced that it’s worth hanging on to. Your initial effort determines whether you’ll remember what you’ve heard or read for a lifetime or forget it in a matter of seconds.
Top Students Avoid Pseudo-Forgetting
Whenever you cannot remember a name, a telephone number, a fact, an idea, or even a joke, it’s quite natural to say, “I forgot.” Yet forgetting may have nothing to do with your problem. You may never have learned the information in the first place. This phenomenon is known as pseudo-forgetting. The word pseudo means “false” or “phony.” The best thing you can do to improve your memory is to pay close attention to the things you want to remember, this is what Top Students do to make what they have learned stick.
If an idea or a fact is to be retained in your memory for any length of time, it must be impressed on your mind clearly and crisply at least once. A record of that idea or fact must be laid down in your brain before you can truly recall or forget what you’ve learned. You can create this record by jotting the new information down or by repeating it aloud. If you are accustomed to meeting a lot of new people, perhaps you already know the technique of repeating the name of the person to whom you’ve just been introduced. Instead of saying “Pleased to meet you,” you say “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Ben.” This approach is not only personable, but it also provides an easy way to counteract pseudo-forgetting.
TIPS FOR TAKING TESTS/EXAMS
- Look over the entire test - know how much each question is worth and budget your time accordingly. Check the clock every 10 minutes to insure you will not be caught off guard and run out of time. If necessary, put your watch on the desk in front of you.
- Answer the easiest questions first - Put a check by those that are harder and return to those questions last. Otherwise, you will waste valuable time and miss answering the easier questions. Place another line through the check when you complete the harder questions.
- Underline key words in the question - Make special note of negative words like "not." Feel free, however, to ask for clarification from your instructor if the question is vague or unclear.
