We continue the story of what techniques, confirmed by scientific experiments, can help in learning at any age. IN we discussed obvious recommendations like “a smart daily routine” and other attributes of a healthy lifestyle. In it was about how dudling helps to better fix the material in the lecture, and the reasoning about the upcoming exam allows you to get a higher mark.
Today we are talking about what tips scientists help memorize information more efficiently, and forget important information more slowly.
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Storytelling - remembering through understanding
One way to better remember information (for example, before an important exam) is storytelling. Let's see why. Storytelling is a technique that is now popular in a huge number of areas: from marketing and advertising to publications in the non-fiction genre. Its essence, in its most general form, is that the narrator turns a set of facts into a narrative, a sequence of interrelated events.
Such stories are much easier to perceive than loosely interconnected data, so a technique that can be used when memorizing material is to try to build the information that needs to be remembered into a story (or even several stories). Of course, this approach requires creativity and a lot of effort - especially if you need to remember, for example, the proof of a theorem - when it comes to formulas, there is no time for stories.
However, in this case, you can use techniques that are indirectly related to storytelling. One of the options is offered, in particular, by scientists from Columbia University (USA), last year the results of his research in the journal Psychological Science.
The researchers who worked on the study studied the impact of a critical approach to evaluating information on the ability to perceive and remember data. A critical approach is somewhat like arguing with an “inner skeptic” who is not satisfied with your arguments and who questions everything you say.
How the study was conducted: 60 student participants in the experiment were given input data. They included information about "elections of the mayor in some city X": the political programs of the candidates and a description of the problems of the fictitious town. The control group was asked to write an essay about the merits of each candidate, while the experimental group was asked to describe a dialogue between political show participants discussing the candidates. Both groups (control and experimental) were then asked to write a script for a television performance in favor of their favorite candidate.
It turned out that in the final scenario, the experimental group provided more facts, used more precise wording, and demonstrated a better understanding of the material. In the text for the TV commercial, students from the experimental group demonstrated the differences between the candidates and their programs and provided more information about how the candidate they like is going to solve city problems.
Moreover, the experimental group expressed their ideas more precisely: among all the students in the experimental group, only 20% made statements in the final script of the TV commercial that were not supported by facts (i.e. input data). In the control group, 60% of students made such statements.
Как the authors of the article, the study of various critical opinions regarding a particular issue contributes to a more thorough study of it. This approach affects how you perceive information - "internal dialogue with the critic" allows you to not just take knowledge on faith. You start looking for alternatives, give examples and evidence - and thus understand the issue deeper and remember more useful details.
This approach, for example, helps to better prepare for tricky questions in the exam. Of course, you won’t be able to predict everything that the teacher might ask you, but you will feel much more confident and prepared - since you have already “lost” similar situations in your head.
forgetting curve
If “self-talk” is a good way to better understand information, then knowing how the forgetting curve works (and how you can cheat it) will help you retain useful information for as long as possible. Ideally, keep the knowledge gained in the lecture until the exam (and, more importantly, after it).
- not a new discovery, for the first time this term was introduced by the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885. Ebbinghaus studied mechanical memory and was able to deduce patterns between the time since data was received, the number of repetitions, and the percentage of information that is eventually stored in memory.
Ebbinghaus conducted experiments on training "mechanical memory" - on memorizing meaningless syllables that should not cause any associations in the memory. It is extremely difficult to remember nonsense (such sequences “erase” from memory very easily) - however, the forgetting curve “works” with respect to quite meaningful, meaningful data.
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For example, in relation to a university course, the forgetting curve can be interpreted as follows: immediately after attending a lecture, you have a certain amount of knowledge. It can be designated as 100% (roughly, "you know everything you know").
If the next day you do not return to your lecture notes and repeat the material, then by the end of this day only 20-50% of all the information received at the lecture will remain in your memory (again, this is not a fraction of all the information that the teacher gave at the lecture , but from everything that you personally managed to remember at the lecture). In a month, with this approach, you will be able to remember about 2-3% of the information received - as a result, before the exam, you will have to thoroughly sit down for the theory and learn tickets almost from scratch.
The way out here is quite simple - in order not to memorize information “like the first time”, it is enough to regularly repeat it from notes from lectures or from a textbook. Of course, this is a rather boring procedure, but it can save a lot of time before exams (and secure knowledge in long-term memory). Repetition in this case serves as a clear signal to the brain that this information is really important. As a result, the approach will allow both better preservation of knowledge and faster “activation” of access to it at the right time.
For example, the Canadian University of Waterloo to their students to adhere to the following tactics: “The main recommendation is to give a repetition of what has been covered for about half an hour on weekdays and from one and a half to two hours on weekends. Even if you can only repeat information 4-5 days a week, you will still remember much more than the 2-3% of the data that would remain in your memory if you did nothing at all.
TL; DR
- To better remember information, try using the storytelling technique. When you tie facts into a story, a narrative, you remember them better. Of course, this approach requires serious preparation and is not always effective - it is difficult to come up with a narrative if you have to memorize mathematical proofs or formulas in physics.
- In this case, a good alternative to “traditional” storytelling is self-talk. To better understand the subject, try to imagine that an imaginary interlocutor objects to you, and you are trying to convince him. This format is more versatile, and at the same time has a number of positive features. First, it stimulates critical thinking (you don't take facts you're trying to remember for granted, but look for evidence to support your point of view). Secondly, this method allows you to delve deeper into the issue. Third, and especially useful on the eve of an exam, this technique allows you to rehearse tricky questions and potential bottlenecks in your answer. Yes, such rehearsal can take a lot of time, but in some cases it is much more effective than trying to memorize the material mechanically.
- Speaking of rote learning, remember the forgetting curve. Reviewing the material covered (for example, from lecture notes) for at least 30 minutes daily will allow you to retain most of the information in your memory - so that on the eve of the exam you do not have to learn the topic from scratch. The staff of the University of Waterloo advises to conduct an experiment and try out the technique of such a repetition for at least two weeks - and track your results.
- And if you're worried that your notes aren't very informative, try the techniques we wrote about. .
Source: habr.com