Tips for Academic Success
9. Improve Your Memory
You may think you are a strong student. But if you cannot keep and retrieve what you have learned, it doesn't work. We will try to explain how memory works and how you can improve your memory.
- Sensory Register (SR) catches information for you to judge if you should attend to it further.
- Short-Term Memory (STM) is a working memory that holds information for only 20 seconds or so.
- Long-Term Memory (LTM) may permanently store everything you have ever learned.
- Rehearsal can serve to hold information in STM for immediate use or can help to move information to long-term memory.
- Attention is a focusing process that enables you to select the appropriate stimuli for further mental activity.
- Recognition relates to your ability to notice the sensory stimuli presented and to relate them to information previously stored.
- Well-organized material and information that is meaningful, which "connects" with prior learning, will be learned more quickly, encoded in LTM, and retained for future retrieval.
- Rehearsal, repetition, and practice are essential for encoding material into short-term and long-term memory. Studying is just another term to describe Rehearsal, Repetition, and Practice.
- Visual Memory Procedures. Try to form a mental image of what you are trying to learn: see it, hear it in your mind in addition to saying it out loud. Verbal encoding procedures such as category clustering and concept mapping may be helpful when trying to learn lots of formulas, facts, or other such information. Key-Word Method involves recoding, relating, and retrieving.
- Your note taking style and methods should be related to your memory capabilities; they should complement each other. Even if you have a good memory, you still should take good notes because your memory can fade but written notes are permanent.
Last modified: June 12, 2007 14:15:06