Friends, exams are upon us. So now’s as good a time as any to look at ways to get the largest bang for your educational buck. Sure, we’ve all got our own tried and true studying techniques. After all, what were all those years of perfecting cram sessions for? But here’s a look at what the experts say about getting stuff in and out of your head as efficiently as possible. It might even help to take notes.
When psychologists talk about optimizing study habits, they’re usually talking about memory. You can think of memory as a code for all the information you need to remember: to get something into your memory, you need to encode it. The process of encoding is affected by everything from your physical environment to the number of hours you spend learning it. Research shows that retention is greater when studying is spread out in smaller chunks over a few days, rather than massed together on one day. Crammers, take heed.
Alas, the unfortunate truth is that in some classes, you’ve just got to memorize. But that doesn’t mean staring at the same page for an hour while you wait for the memory gods to intervene. According to the “levels of processing” theory of memory, if you process the information you’re learning in a “deeper” way, you will be able to remember it better. Using a deep level of processing means you are making links between the information and other concepts already stored in memory. The more connections you make, the easier it is to retrieve the information from memory.
In a classic processing experiment, participants were asked to answer questions relating to specific words. For example, given the word “SHARK,” they could be asked: Is the word in capital letters? Does it rhyme with “bark”? Is the word a type of fish? These questions represented different levels of processing, with letter-case representing shallow processing, rhyming corresponding to intermediate, and meaning characterizing a deep level of processing. The participants were then given a surprise memory test where they had to recognize which words they had already seen from a list of both old and new words. The experimenters found that when participants used deeper processing for a word in the initial task, they were able to remember it significantly better.
But what does that mean when you’re trying to memorize the anatomical features of the ringworm? According to levels of processing theory, instead of repeating the information over and over, try to make sense of it by relating it to personal experiences, or by creating a story around it. That will make for a deeper level of processing. It also helps to structure the information you’re trying to encode, since this elaborates the connections between concepts.
Now, when it comes to picking an environment for studying, it’s best to choose only one or two spaces. Using the same space to study actually enhances your ability to remember the things you learned in that environment, according to the “encoding specificity” theory of memory. According to the theory, which was developed by U of T professor emeritus Endel Tulving, you’ll remember information better when the context of encoding (in this case, your environment) matches the context of retrieval.
In one encoding specificity experiment, participants were asked to learn a set of words either on land, or under water. They were then given a memory test of those words either in the same environment, or the opposite one. The results showed that when the environment of encoding matched that of retrieval, participants remembered more words.
The same also goes for internal states. If you’re in a good mood while you study, you’ll tend to do better if you’re in the same mood when you take the test. In fact, even your degree of sobriety affects encoding specificity. So, if you have the tendency to get intoxicated while studying, you’ll actually remember more information while writing the test if you’re also boozed up in the exam room. That said, psychologists recommend you stay sober at encoding and retrieval for optimal results.
And one last thing. Good luck!
