The (possible) Solution - Why it works

The last thing I want is a study workshop that's a waste of time. Even if a student actually has room for improvement in their study techniques, if they don't believe the workshop is relevant then it can easily become a waste of time. So, the solution will hopefully be to look at how our mind actually remembers information and how it chooses what to forget. Combine that with the previous workshop and we should be able to arrive at a much better understanding of WHY certain study techniques work better than others. 

Learning or Forgetting

Let's start by considering how we take in information. We are constantly bombarded with information in the world around us through our senses. It's impossible to even process all of this so most is instantly forgotten. Some is brought into our working memory where we can act on it. (Try adding 23 to 19.....the part of your brain you just used is your working memory.) Many of these things can also be forgotten fairly quickly. The colour of a traffic light as you come up to a pedestrian crossing is pretty important at that time but you can safely forget it after you crossed the road.

Other things like the name of a new neighbour or your French verbs you'd like to remember for quite a while. Ideally this goes into our long term memory which is the collection of things you know. This is an ongoing area of research in psychology but at the moment it suggests that more than we think actually does get passed into our long term memory.

Putting things into our long term memory, facts, techniques and so on is what we aim to do when studying. 

So why is it so tricky.....why do we regularly find it difficult to remember stuff? 

Remembering

The other half of the problem is how to remember stuff. Have you ever had the experience of having information like the name of an actor at the tip of your tongue but being unable to remember it. Then, hours later it pops into your mind. Annoying when you're chatting about a new film but even more of a problem when you're taking an exam. 

Along with ensuring we get things into our long term memory, we need to ensure we can get it back out again. Two factors that have a big influence on this are:

1. How often we access the information

2. How well connected it is to other things we know 

​(There are other factors such as the strength of emotion connected to the memory but they're not as relevant to academic study so I'll leave them aside for now. )

If we keep accessing a certain piece of information a lot, it's like a signal to our brain that this is something rather important. This causes the brain to thicken the coating (myelin for those who are interested) of the nerve fibres in our brain associated with that information. When I was 8 years old I lived in Philadelphia for several years and even now I could still provide directions from my school bus stop to the house I lived in at that time. This is why regular testing is so important to learning, the act of trying to recalling the information is a cue to your brain to make it easier to recall. Testing is a crucial part of the learning process.

The other factor we'll look at is how well connected a piece of information is. Think of this as how many different paths there are to it. Knowledge is rarely composed of isolated facts (even though some textbooks might suggest this) and the more we can connect it to other things then the easier it is to recall. Good study notes help you see the structure of a topic and how things are interconnected, that way you can often rebuild the information even if one or two pieces are missing. People who are experts in an area often show a high degree of interconnectedness in their knowledge.

To give a simple example, in Junior Science we need to know that blood is made up of 4 different things. Let's see how we can reconstruct that knowledge if we know there are 4 things but can only remember 1.

In our example, we know from experience that blood is red and this triggers the memory of red blood cells. You then recall that there's another colour involved that comes into play when you're sick and after trying a few potential colours you realise it's white blood cells that fight infection. What about the other two? Well, let's come back to our own experiences which are always stronger memories. After you got that cut on your knee, what happened? It stopped bleeding and formed a scab - aha platelets! Finally, what's left? Well the three examples so far are all cells but blood is a liquid so we're missing the liquid that everything gets mixed up in. Plasma. Sorted.

This example requires a level of learning to have taken place but then builds upon the connections and experiences we have to rebuild the weak connections we might have from just looking at a list of terms. We also fit the purpose of each component of the blood in quite easily too. What's important to realise is that the process of figuring all that out while talking to a friend or testing yourself is a very powerful learning experience that leaves you with a much stronger set of connections. 

This is why the two things we recommend from 1st year when studying are:

1. Making notes

2. Testing yourself