ii. Study Strategies

Everyone wishes they had a better memory or a stronger way to use memorization. You can make the most of the memory you have by making some conscious decisions about how you study and prepare for exams. Incorporate these ideas into your study sessions:

Practicing effective memorization is when you use a trick, technique, or strategy to recall something—for another class, an exam, or even to bring up an acquaintance’s name in a social situation. Really whatever works for you to recall information is a good tool to have. You can create your own quizzes and tests to go over material from class. You can use mnemonics to jog your memory. You can work in groups to develop unique ways to remember complex information. Whatever methods you choose to enhance your memory, keep in mind that repetition is one of the most effective tools in any memory strategy. Do whatever you do over and over for the best results.

Photo by University of New Orleans

Using Mnemonics

Mnemonics (pronounced new-monics) are a way to remember things using reminders that are linked to the content you are trying to remember. Did you learn the points of the compass by remembering NEWS (north, east, west, and south)? Or the notes on the music staff as FACE or EGBDF (every good boy does fine)? These are mnemonics, specifically acronyms, or words created out of the first letters of the terms you are trying to recall. When you’re first learning something and you aren’t familiar with the foundational concepts, these help you bring up the information quickly, especially for multistep processes or lists. After you’ve worked in that discipline for a while, you likely don’t need the mnemonics, but you probably won’t forget them either.

There are a variety of mnemonics that work well for college students but use them with caution as they are good for learning basic information and not complex material. In addition to acronyms, here are a few that college students have used to help them recall.

• Acrostic sentences. These are sentences formed from the first letter of each item you are trying to remember. They work best for remembering steps in a process. For example, “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally” is an acrostic sentence for the steps in the order of operations when solving an equation. Each word starts with a letter that corresponds to another word in the steps: Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, and Subtraction.
• Chunking. Grouping items together is another way to improve recall by organizing them by a characteristic they have in common. For example, you may need to remember the countries in Africa and could organize them by relative size, location (north, south, etc.), or letter they begin with.
• Memory palace. This mnemonic device is more complicated than most because it requires a few steps to create, but many students have found that this strategy works well for them in classes where they must recall a large amount of content. The memory palace, also called a Roman Room or the loci method, requires you to think of a physical space, real or imagined, in which you can “place” items you need to recall within that location. For example, if you are thinking of your own bedroom as the space and you need to remember the parts of speech, you may place “verb” in front of the door to your room as you will need to use an action to open it up. Then, your bed may be where you place “noun” because it is where you add actions such as sleep, read, and daydream. The mirror on your wall may be where you place the term “adjective” because you look into it every day to see what you look like: sad, happy, sleepy.