Improve Your Memory
Presented by Ingrid Riener
Student Services
The University of Queensland
Improve Your Memory
Test or exam coming up?
Improve Your Memory
Your current strategies and
techniques?
Rose
Statue
How would
you go about
memorising
this list?
Italy
Assets
Envy
Biochemistry
Zimbabwe
Art
Reflection
Width
Democracy
Agoraphobia
Oranges
Improve Your Memory
Learning in an academic context
• Make sense of new material
• Organise material: patterns and linking
• Revise what you’ve learned
• memory techniques
• revision strategies
Improve Your Memory
Your approach to learning?
Rote learning?
Meaningful learning?
Trying to remember
something by going over
it or repeating it over and
over again
Making sense of something
before trying to memorise it
Improve Your Memory
Make sense of the material
• Understand material and make it meaningful:
• material that makes sense to you is easier to
learn
• try to identify purposes for learning and look
for practical applications
• Learning builds on learning:
• look for opportunities to associate new
information with old material
Improve Your Memory
Organise your learning content
• Break material down into manageable chunks
that are more easily understandable
• Explore how new ideas fit in with what you
already know
• Identify patterns, categories, stories, and
sequences in the material
• link new items with existing patterns and
categories
• Develop concept maps to show how new
information fits into the bigger picture
Improve Your Memory
Patterns
•
Try to identify a rule,
organising principle or
pattern in the material
e.g. to memorise
Australia’s states,
start with states
in the East and
move to those in
the West
Western Australia
Queensland
Tasmania
Improve Your Memory
Linking
•
As you would prepare a canvas for
paint, prepare your mind for new
material by pre-reading for lectures
•
helps you to link new information to
what’s already known or familiar
•
increases retention rates
Improve Your Memory
Make it memorable!
• Imagine how something works or
what it looks like (and draw it)
• Transform the material into
something new
• e.g. convert linear text into a table or
flow chart
• Use all your senses to enliven the
content
Improve Your Memory
Playfulness
•
Be PLAYFUL
•
use humour
and doodle!
Improve Your Memory
Rhymes
• Use rhymes to make
content more meaningful
(and therefore easier to
remember)
• e.g. ‘Id is the kid!’
(Freud)
‘Thirty days hath
September,
April, June and
November …’
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Visualisation
• Link unfamiliar content
with what’s familiar
• e.g. the loci method:
visually associate
new material with a
familiar location
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Other techniques
• Analogies: e.g. a biological cell as a city
• Acronyms: e.g. LASER (Light Amplification
by Stimulated Emission of Radiation)
you make up appropriate acronyms using
the first letter of each word in your list
• Acrostics: e.g. Order of taxonomy in biology
Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family,
Genus, Species (Kids Prefer Cheese Over
Fried Green Spinach)
Improve Your Memory
Revision strategies
•
Revise sections or chunks of work 3 to 5
times in preparation for exams or tests
•
Leave appropriate gaps between revision
sessions
•
Use hooks or clues (like acronyms or
visualisations) so that stored material can
be recalled when needed
•
Make good use of primacy and recency
effects
Improve Your Memory
Likelihood of
remembering
Primacy and recency effects
Beginning
End
Position in list
Improve Your Memory
Primacy and recency effects
• Primacy effect: items at the beginning of a list
are more easily remembered (little
interference)
• Recency effect: last few items are likely to be
remembered (still in working memory)
• Keep study sessions relatively short to make
good use of these effects
• Revise key information at the beginning and
end of study sessions, but also …
• vary what material you start and end a
study session with
Improve Your Memory
The benefits of self-testing
Improve Your Memory
Self-testing: tips
• Use past exam papers and questions and
exercises from tutorials and text books to test
yourself
• Predict questions and multiple-choice
distractors in exams and use them to test
yourself (and members of your study group?)
• Try to replicate exam conditions wherever
possible: venue, time allocation and
atmosphere
Improve Your Memory