How to Remember Everything You Learn Review Litterature
past William Wadsworth
The Cambridge-educated retentiveness psychologist & study bus on a mission to assist YOU ace your exams. Helping half a meg students in 175+ countries every year to report smarter, not harder. Supercharge your studies today with our time-saving, course-boosting "genius" study tips canvas.
Pretty recently – the terminal decade or and then – scientists have reached broad understanding that there is i memorisation technique for exams and tests that, above all others, volition solve the age-old question of how to retrieve what y'all study.
Earlier I tell you what the technique is, I was shocked to larn that equally few every bit 7% of college-level students (and possibly even fewer students at high school) say they are using this technique as their primary revision strategy.
So what's the technique?
It's chosen "retrieval practice", and it'due south based on the act of trying to pull information out of your retentivity.
Information technology seems counter-intuitive at showtime that trying to remember something helps you to learn it, merely you'll exist astonished at how powerful this strategy can be for getting data locked away in retentivity, set for when you need it.
Read on to discover:
- how retrieval practice works
- why it's and so useful
- and precisely how you should exist using retrieval do memorisation techniques to prepare for exams – including some common mistakes people often make when applying it.
What is "retrieval do" and how tin can it aid you lot to call back what you study?
When psychologists talk about "retrieving" something from memory, they hateful recalling information technology, or remembering it. So "retrieval practice" just means practising remembering a slice of data you previously read, heard or saw.
A mutual misunderstanding – 1 I held myself for many years when studying for exams in high school – is that testing yourself on what yous know only serves to "bank check" how much you know at that point, i.east. it won't assist yous actually learn information.
We now know that's not true.
A gigantic review of hundreds of studies testing how well diverse memorisation techniques prepared students for exams or tests concluded that, above all other techniques, retrieval practice (or "practice testing" as the review called it) was the most powerful.
The results from many of these studies were astonishing: students oft improved by a whole grade (or more!) when learning using retrieval practice.
Part of the problem is that our ain intuitions as students about what learning techniques are working for us are ofttimes flawed.
I highly recommend you take a expect at a guest postal service I've written for my friends at Titanium Tutors, where I explain a fascinating experiment that beautifully demonstrates how our intuitions oftentimes atomic number 82 to u.s.a. making bad decisions near how to revise – and what nosotros can do about it.
Benefits of using retrieval practise to learn for exams, and how it helps you to acquire information
Retrieval practise works in a number of means:
- Helps yous lock information into memory: the very human activity of pulling a slice of information out of your memory ways you can remember it more hands subsequently on.
- Helps you find the gaps in your cognition: past testing yourself, you'll have a meliorate idea of what y'all know and where yous demand to exercise more than work.
- Helps you lot apply information to new contexts: it's not just about learning the facts, studying using retrieval practice makes it more likely that you will be able to figure out unfamiliar issues based on what you know, make leaps of intuition, and apply noesis in new ways. These are all skills often demanded by the questions that unlock top marks in exams.
The starting time of these is probably the virtually of import of these effects, only besides the most surprising: it can seem strange at showtime that only trying to recall something will strengthen your retentivity of that information, making information technology easier to remember information technology later on.
But think of it like this: a big chunk of success in near exams comes downwardly to simply being able to recall the information from your grade. In other words, the exam tests your memory of what you learned.
Let me give you an analogy. If you're preparation for the Olympics, you lot'll train for your called sport first and foremost by practising that sport.
For instance:
If you lot're a long jumper, your nearly important grooming will be practising jumping.
If you lot're a weightlifter, your most of import training will exist practising lifting weights.
If y'all're a 100m runner, your most important training will be practising sprinting.
So given that, if you're a educatee preparing for exams that are largely tests of retentiveness, your nigh important training should be practising remembering information.
Sure, you'll need to do other things likewise – the runner will need to spend time in the gym doing leg exercises, and the educatee volition need to spend time (re-)reading unfamiliar material, or working on their exam technique, or how they structure their essays. Simply the focus for getting noesis under your belt and into your retention should be retrieval exercise.
I oftentimes say to my more sporty students that the moment in which yous're trying to call back a fact is the "rep" (a "rep" is a single component of an exercise that makes you lot stronger – a single press-upward, a unmarried bicep coil, or a single pull-up in a fix).
Fascinatingly, whether you succeed in pulling the fact you're searching for out of your memory or non, you'll all the same have done some proficient!
How to memorise for exams with retrieval practice strategies
So how to apply all of this when studying?
Here are some of my favourite retrieval practice based memorisation techniques for exams and tests you can start using today:
- Write what you know from retentivity on a bare sheet: a plain sheet of paper is a very under-rated study tool! Put your books away, so scribble downwardly everything yous can remember about a topic. Later on you've squeezed out as much equally you lot can from memory, you might like to get back and add in any missing details in a dissimilar coloured pen. Next time you railroad train yourself on this topic, aim to have fewer missing details – until y'all take none at all come up the week before the exam!
- Draw concept maps from memory: a slightly more sophisticated variant on the "bare sail" method is drawing concept maps based on what you lot know of a topic. A concept map links ideas together visually, putting ideas in boxes, and linking them together with arrows to show how they relate.
Unlike mind maps, they are quick to draw, placing more importance on getting the right data down on the folio, with a sensible structure around it, rather than spending too long making the concluding result sumptuously beautiful (I know it's fun… but you're not going to exist graded on your artwork at the cease of the twenty-four hour period! Unless you're studying Fine art, of course…)
Here'southward an example of a concept map summarising what you might demand to know near rates of reaction in chemistry:
Got stuck sequencing my GCSE rates lessons until I made a concept map inspired past @Mr_Raichura's #CogSciSci talk. Information technology works! moving picture.twitter.com/a7oRW1IueW
— Elizabeth Mountstevens (@DrMountstevens) August 18, 2018
- Practice questions: Work through exercises from your text book or revision guide. Reply real exam questions. Or even make upwardly your ain quiz questions – I know some students who like to revise by first reading through their notes, making a list of their own "quiz questions" they know they volition need to exist able to answer to bear witness they know that topic properly. Then they put their notes away, and take the quiz.
- Train with flash cards: start past making them, and and then use them! Flash cards are my favourite way to learn large amounts of information rapidly, and through long experience (both my own, and coaching students), in that location are some very specific steps you need to take to go the most out of studying with wink cards.
Psst… why non take hold of a gratis copy of my "scientific discipline of learning cheat sail", which includes a deep-dive "DOs and DONTs" to get the most out of retrieval practice techniques like flash cards:
Whichever of these techniques you're using, continue your notes abroad until you've had a good endeavor at remembering. So you tin can cheque your notes (or the mark scheme, if you're doing by exam questions) and give yourself feedback on where you lot went wrong.
This feedback step, understanding where you lot missed things or slipped up, is a very important function of the overall learning process, and then don't skimp on it.
If you lot find you can't reliably remember a item aspect of a topic, you'll know to prioritise giving that result some extra fourth dimension until you have it nailed.
Don't brand these mistakes when using retrieval do
Even the all-time memory techniques in the world won't work properly if non applied correctly. Some traps to avert when yous're using retrieval practice techniques in your studies:
one. Some difficulty is good, but if it'due south also difficult, make information technology easier…
If you can barely call up anything in a topic, no affair how hard you lot try, you lot probably demand to back up a stride.
Going back and re-reading your notes at this bespeak is OK, and if you're struggling to go from re-reading to remembering at least a good chunk of what yous've only read, you demand to break it upwardly into smaller chunks.
Accept what you lot're trying to larn 1 segment at a time, become comfortable retrieving each segment on its own, then start to cord them together.
Or for tricky memory jobs, endeavor using intermediate prompts as "stepping stones" to jog your memory while also giving information technology space to do at to the lowest degree some retrieval practice.
Here are a few fun and artistic ideas for how you could use "stepping stones" in practice, to build upwardly gradually to remembering the whole thing from scratch. The video is near remembering English literature quotes (difficult!), just some of the ideas here could easily be applied to other subjects, from recalling maths formulas to learning anatomical terms:
2. Only if it's likewise like shooting fish in a barrel, you need to make it harder
On the other paw, if y'all break something up so small that information technology becomes trivial to recollect, you're not giving yourself plenty of a memory workout and the benefits will exist limited.
Say you're trying to learn the formula for a chemic compound – you could acquire it one atom at a time, and test yourself on each atom in the seconds subsequently looking at it. With such small amounts of information and no delay before trying to remember it, you won't even pause a sweat equally you recollect each atom perfectly – but what you've learned won't stick in memory for long.
Then if information technology feels besides easy, try going for larger chunks of knowledge, or leaving more of a gap between re-reading information and doing retrieval practice on it.
three. Don't let yourself get away with non fully knowing something!
Let'southward say you're working with flashcards. You might experience like you most knew it, flip the menu, find something familiar, and say "ah yeah, I did know that".
Simply beware! You didn't, did yous?
Train with discipline: give yourself a adept moment to rummage through your brain for the information, and if it's not at that place, annotation it down as a missed attempt and come back to it over again.
Call back, even failing to recollect something is useful retentivity grooming equally long as you lot gave it a proficient endeavour!
Though obviously your goal is to succeed in remembering things, so pay special attention to the things you couldn't recall at the end of the session, and in your review at the stop of the day.
4. Remembering something one time doesn't prove you'll know it forever
Just considering yous know it today, doesn't mean you'll remember information technology tomorrow, or side by side calendar week. Some scientists recommend aiming for at least 3 successful retrieval attempts before deciding you "know" something – though you lot might need more than, depending on how long yous've got before your exam, and how complex the information is.
five. If y'all're trying to remember something circuitous, write it down
If you're trying to remember a long formula, big number, quote, list, or diagram, you won't be able to concur it all in your brain at one time.
Say you need to call up a listing of 7 factors.
Past the time you're trying to remember the sixth particular, you lot can't be sure whether you're remembering a sixth that you hadn't already idea of, or whether you're actually but re-list one of the items yous'd already come with!
So go the component parts out of your head and down on a sheet of paper as you recall of them, then your retentiveness is freed up to focus on remembering the missing information, and yous can be certain you've got information technology all.
At first, retrieval practice won't feel similar the easiest way to memorise for exams, but stick with it!
You lot're in aristocracy study territory now: whatever educatee that decides to utilise all of this properly volition have a massive head-first on their peers when it comes to learning information for their exams.
Retrieval do is incredibly powerful, but, let'due south exist honest, trying to pull information out of your brain is going to experience similar harder work than just sitting back and re-reading your notes over again!
A lot of students experience they prefer other ways to report for your exams: re-reading, highlighting, making notes or summarising are all very popular choices.
Just here's the thing:
Our own intuitions nearly what study techniques work best are really bad! Studies have repeatedly shown that "feel good" study methods that students like best (probably because they don't accept quite so much effort!) are having relatively pocket-size benefits, comparison to slightly more effortful but much more effective memorisation techniques for exams like retrieval practise.
Trust the science, and give it a go: you volition exist astonished at the results!
Ooooh, and merely before you go… don't leave without your copy of my "Scientific discipline of Learning Cheat Canvas": my four best fave strategies for studying smarter. Retrieval practice is absolutely on the listing – but make certain you check out the other techniques too!
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Founder and Director of Learning Science at Exam Study Expert
William Wadsworth is a Cambridge University educated psychologist and learning science researcher. He got top 0.01% exam results in the U.k. equally a student over x years agone, and always since has been obsessed with helping subsequent generations of students ace their exams, through the science of studying smarter, not harder. Half a million students in 150+ countries follow his advice through this site and the Exam Study Expert podcast, and he's the acknowledged author of the "ingenious" guide to test-taking strategy, Outsmart Your Exams. To get in bear upon with William, including to discover out more nigh his transformational 1:i coaching sessions, please click hither.
Source: https://examstudyexpert.com/memorisation-techniques-for-exams/
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