Memory, Studying and Test Taking Notes

Chapter Outline

• 6.1 Memory
• 6.2 Studying
• 6.3 Test Taking

Student Survey

• Rate confidence in preparing for and taking tests (1-4 scale, 1 = least like me, 4 = most like me).
• Questions:
  1. I set aside enough time to prepare for tests.
  2. If I don’t set aside enough time, I can usually cram and get positive results.
  3. I prefer to pull all-nighters.
  4. I study my notes but still don’t feel successful.
• Revisit questions at the end of the chapter to see if feelings have changed.

Student Profile

• Lilli Branstetter (University of Central Arkansas) emphasized:
  • Testing yourself is one of the best strategies.
  • Reviewing graded tests helps see where you went wrong.
  • Correcting mistakes helps storage and retrieval strength.
  • Getting a question wrong can improve memory for next time.

About this Chapter

• By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
  • Outline the importance of memory.
  • Discuss ways to increase studying effectiveness.
  • Articulate test-taking strategies.
• College requires major modification of study habits.
• Better study/test-taking skills lead to higher grades and long-term knowledge.
• Maintaining skills is crucial as content becomes increasingly complex.
• Skills can be used in the work environment for problem-solving.
• True learning means committing content to long-term memory.

Questions to Consider:

• How does working memory work?
• What’s the difference between working and short-term memory?
• How does long-term memory function?
• What obstacles exist to remembering?
• When and how should you memorize things?
• What can you do consistently to improve memory?

Memory

• Memory is a mysterious element in life.
• We lose the capacity to remember things as we age.
• Scientists continue to study how we remember.
• Nelson Cowan breaks down the different types of memory.
• When we remember something, we actually do quite a lot of thinking.

Three Basic Steps When We Remember Ideas or Images:

1. Encoding: perceiving information through senses.
   • Brains encode/label content in short-term memory.
2. Storage: storing important information in long-term memory.
3. Retrieval: recalling/retrieving information to do something with it.

Foundations of Memory

• Memory is a term applied to biological devices by which living organisms acquire, retain, and make use of skills and knowledge.
• It is present in all forms of higher order animals.
• The most evolutionary forms of memory have taken place in human beings.
• A complete understanding of human memory does not exist.

Working Memory

• Working memory is a type of short-term memory used when actively performing a task.
• Example: Nursing student Marilyn needs to use her knowledge of chemical reactions to suggest appropriate prescriptions in various medical case studies.
• You have access to stored information that helps complete the task.

Short-Term Memory

• Helps us remember where we set our keys or where we left off on a project the day before.
• We employ aids to help us with short-term memory.
• Example: hanging your keys in a particular place each evening so you know exactly where they are supposed to be.
• Example: Choosing a product because you recall an advertising jingle?
• The key is deliberate use of strategies that are not so elaborate that they are too difficult to remember in our short-term memory.

Activity

• Consider this list of items:
  • Baseball
  • Picture frame
  • Tissue
  • Paper clip
  • Bread
  • Pair of dice
  • Fingernail polish
  • Spoon
  • Marble
  • Leaf
  • Doll
  • Scissors
  • Cup
  • Jar of sand
  • Deck of cards
  • Ring
  • Blanket
  • Ice
  • Marker
  • String
• Look at the list for no more than 30 seconds. Cover up the list and complete an activity.
• Harvard psychology professor George A. Miller in 1956 claimed humans can recall about five to nine bits of information in our short-term memory at any given time.
• Miller’s article is entitled "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two"
• To combat this limitation, we clump information together, making connections to help us stretch our capacity to remember.

Activity

• Revisit the items above and organize them in a way that you would have about five groups of items.
• Row 1: Items found in a kitchen
• Row 2: Items that a child would play with
• Row 3: Items of nature
• Row 4: Items in a desk drawer/school supplies
• Row 5: Items found in a bedroom
• Now that you have grouped items into categories, also known as chunking, you can work on remembering the categories and the items that fit into those categories, which will result in remembering more items.

Long-Term Memory

• Long-term memory is exactly what it sounds like.
• These are things you recall from the past.
• Example: the smell of your elementary school cafeteria or how to pop a wheelie on a bicycle.
• Our brain keeps a vast array of information, images, and sensory experiences in long-term memory.
• Whatever it is we are trying to keep in our memories must first come into our brains in short-term memory.
• If we want these fleeting ideas to transfer into long-term memory, we have to do some work.
• Alison Preston of the University of Texas at Austin's Center for Learning and Memory indicated:
  • “A short-term memory's conversion to a long-term memory requires changes within the brain . . . and result[s] in changes to neurons (nerve cells) or sets of neurons. . . . For example, new synapses—the connections between neurons through which they exchange information—can form to allow for communication between new networks of neurons. Alternatively, existing synapses can be strengthened to allow for increased sensitivity in the communication between two neurons.”
• When you work to convert your thoughts into memories, you are literally changing your mind.
• Much of this brain work begins in the part of the brain called the hippocampus.

Obstacles to Remembering

• Students face several significant obstacles to remembering, including a persistent lack of sleep and an unrealistic reliance on cramming.

Lack of Sleep

• Lack of sleep impairs judgment, focus, and our overall mood.
• Medical study from UCLA claims that sleep deprivation is as dangerous as being drunk.
• If you can’t focus well because you didn’t get enough sleep, then you likely won’t be able to remember whatever it is you need to recall for any sort of studying or test-taking situation.
• Your brain on adequate sleep is amazing, and sleep can actually assist you in making connections, remembering difficult concepts, and studying for exams.
  • If you’re interested in learning more about this research, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) is a good place to start.

Downside of Cramming

• More and more research is showing that the stress combined with the way our brains work, makes cramming a seriously poor choice for learning.
• Sleep researcher, Dr. Susan Redline from Boston, says, "Sleep deficiency can affect mood and the ability to make memories and learn, but it also affects metabolism, appetite, blood pressure, levels of inflammation in the body and perhaps even the immune response."
• Cramming causes stress, which can lead to paralyzing test anxiety.
• Leading neuroscientist John Medina claims that the brain begins to wander at about 10 minutes, at which point you need a new stimulus to spark interest.

What Students Say

1. Which of the following is your most common method of studying?
   • Reading or rereading the text or my class notes.
   • Watching videos of my instructor's lecture or other people discussing the topics.
   • Taking practice quizzes/tests.
   • Creating/using study tools (flashcards, mnemonic devices, etc.)
   • Working with a study group, tutor, or academic support.
2. Which of the following do you have the most difficulty remembering?
   • Vocabulary and facts (such as Biology vocab, Historical facts.)
   • Problem-solving methods (such as in Math)
   • Details from text and literature
   • Skills and processes (such as a lab technique or a building process)
   • Computer functions/locations/processes
   • Which formulas, processes, or categories to apply in situations (such as in Physics or Accounting)
3. How much anxiety do you feel when an exam or other major course evaluation is approaching?
   • A great deal
   • A lot
   • A moderate amount
   • A little
   • None at all

Determining When/What to Memorize

• In the realm of learning and studying, some conditions warrant memorization as the most effective way to work with information.
  • Example: If you are expected to have a working knowledge of conversational French or Spanish, you will have to memorize some words.
• Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel concludes that speeding up learning and making studying easier are not good ideas.
• Studying is hard work, and it should be.
• For learning to stick, work hard to pull the information out of our memory and use it by continually pushing ourselves to accomplish increasingly difficult tasks.

Questions to Consider:

• How do you prepare yourself and your environment for successful studying?
• What study strategies will be most beneficial to you?
• What are learning preferences and strategies, and how can you leverage those to your advantage?

Preparing to Study

• Studying is hard work, but you can still learn some techniques to help you be a more effective learner.
• Two major and interrelated techniques involve avoiding distractions to the best of your ability and creating a study environment that works to help you concentrate.

Avoiding Distractions

• Cell phones, tablets, and portable computers that literally bring a world of possibilities to us anywhere have brought distraction to an entirely new level.
• Perhaps the least stressful way to allow yourself a distraction-free environment is to make the study session a definite amount of time.
• Start small and set an alarm—a 30-minute period to review notes, then a brief break, then another 45-minute study session to quiz yourself on the material, and so on.
• When you prepare for your optimal study session, remember to do these things:
  • Put your phone out of sight—in another room or at least some place where you will not see or hear it vibrate or ring.
  • Turn off the television or music.
  • Unless you are deliberately working with a study group, study somewhere alone if possible or at least away from others enough to not hear them talking.

Study Environment

• Sometimes just starting is the hard part; go ahead and begin.
• For long-term success in studying, though, you need a better study setting that will help you get the most out of your limited study time.
• Whatever your space limitations, carve out a place that you can dedicate to reading, writing, note-taking, and reviewing.
• Try to make this area exclusive to your study sessions and something you can leave set up all the time and a place out of the way of family or roommate traffic.
• Wherever you study, try to make it a welcoming place you want to be in—not an uncomfortable environment that makes you want to just do the minimum you must complete and leave.
• You should include the basics: a good chair, a work surface, and whatever materials, books, notes, and other supplies you need for the subject you are studying.
• You may want to consider including a few effective additions if you have the space:
  • small bulletin board for often-used formulas
  • encouraging quotes or pictures of your goal
  • whiteboard for brainstorming
  • sticky notes for reminders in texts and notes
  • file holder for most-used documents
  • bookshelf for reference books

Debunking Study Myths

Myth #1: You can multitask while studying.

• The problem is, multitasking doesn’t really work.

Myth #2: Highlighting main points of a text is useful.

• Actually, you need much more time reviewing and retrieving your lessons and ideas from the text or class lecture as well as quizzing yourself to accomplish your goal of learning so you can perform well on the exam.
• Highlighting is a task you can do rather easily, and it makes you feel good because you are actively engaging with your text, but true learning needs more steps.

Myth #3: Studying effectively is effortless.

• There is nothing effortless, or even pleasant at times, about studying.
• It takes time, effort, and, in some cases, a little drudgery.
• When done right, learning takes focus, deliberate strategies, and time.

Study Strategies

• You can make the most of the memory you have by making some conscious decisions about how you study and prepare for exams.
• 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.

Using Mnemonics

• Mnemonics are a way to remember things using reminders (pronounced new-monics).
• Example: NEWS (north, east, west, and south).
• Example: FACE or EGBDF (every good boy does fine).
• You can certainly make up your own mnemonics, but be careful that your reminder isn’t so complex and convoluted that it is more difficult to remember than the information you were relating it to!

Practicing Concept Association

• When you study, you’re going to make connections to other things—that’s a good thing.
• Make a folder for this assignment where you can put things such as a short summary of your trip to Alabama.
• You may include something from a website that shows you information about that time period.
• Additionally, you could include items about Martin Luther King Jr. ’s life and death and his work for civil rights.

Generating Idea Clusters

• Like mnemonics, idea clusters are nothing more than ways to help your brain come up with ways to recall specific information by connecting it to other knowledge you already have.
• You can do the same thing with song lyrics, lines from movies, or favorite stories where you draw a connection to the well-known phrase or song and the task you need to complete.

Three Effective Study Strategies

1. Spacing—This has to do with when you study. Hint: Don’t cram; study over a period of days, preferably with “breaks” in between.
2. Interleaving—This has to do with what you study. Hint: Don’t study just one type of content, topic, chapter, or unit at a time; instead, mix up the content when you study.
3. Practice testing—This has to do with how you study. Hint: Don’t just reread content. You must quiz or test your ability to retrieve the information from your brain.

Spacing

• Research on memory suggests that giving yourself time in between study sessions actually helps you forget the information.
• Forgetting is actually good for your ability to remember information long-term.
• That’s because every time you forget something, you need to relearn it, leading to gains in your overall understanding and “storage” of the material.

Interleaving

• One particular studying technique is called interleaving, which calls for students to mix up the content that is being studied.
• This means not just spending the entire study session on one sort of problem and then moving on to a different sort of problem at a later time.
• The benefit is that your brain is “mixing up” the information, which can sometimes lead to short-term forgetting but can lead to long-term memory and learning.

Practice Testing

• You can do a practice “test” in two ways.
  • The first way: What was the main idea of this section?
  • The second way: flashcards or an actual test by writing a test.
• Practice testing is an effective study strategy because it helps you practice retrieving information, which is what you want to be able to do when you are taking the real test.
• One of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to someone else.

Recognizing Strengths/Weaknesses of Preferred Study Approaches

• Most of us employ multiple methods of study all the time.
• You usually only run into trouble if you stubbornly rely on just one way to learn or study and the material you’re studying or the task you want to accomplish doesn’t lend itself to that preference.
• When deciding on a study approach, consider what you know about the material and the type of knowledge it involves.
• Consider as many elements as possible about the material -- and the way the material will be assessed -- to help choose a study approach.
• You should also consider your instructor’s preferred method of teaching and learning.

Practicing Active Continuous Improvement for All Preferences

• You can certainly learn through specific approaches or according to specific preferences, but you will also need to adapt to different situations, skills, and subject areas.
• Don’t limit yourself to thinking you can only learn one way or another.
• Dr. Stephen Covey, famous leadership coach and businessman, called this attention to knowing and honing all your skill sets, not just your favorites, sharpening the saw.
• He advised that people should be aware of their strengths but should always hone their weaknesses by saying, “We must never become too busy sawing to take time to sharpen the saw. ”

Preparation vs. Actual Test

• You can replicate the effective sense of urgency an actual test produces by including timed writing into your study sessions.
• On one early exam in history, Stuart learned the prof was going to include several short- answer essay questions—one for each year of the time period covered.
• Stuart set up practice times to write for about 15 to 20 minutes on significant events from his notes because he estimated that would be about how much time he could devote out of the hour-long testing session to write one or two required short-answer questions.

Leveraging Study Habits for Test Prep

• Here’s a checklist for study and test success for your consideration:
  *Mindfully attend class.
  *Take understandable/workable class notes.
  *Review these notes on a schedule that works for you.
  *Read assigned material on time.
  *Participate in class discussions.
  *Ask questions in class and during instructor’s office hours.
  *Meet with study groups between class meetings.
  *Turn in all assignments.
  *Study previous quizzes, tests, and class assignments.
  *Prepare for exams over a period of days instead of cramming.
• As strange as this may sound, you can find some interesting research articles online about using the taste or smell of peppermint to increase memory, recall, and focus.

Whole Person Approach to Testing

• You must see your academic life as one segment of who you are—it’s an important segment, but just one aspect of who you are as a whole person.
• A whole person approach to testing takes a lot of organization, scheduling, and attention to detail, but the life-long benefits make the effort worthwhile.

Establishing Realistic Expectations for Test Situations

• Realistically knowing that your current best may not achieve the highest academic ratings can help you plot your progress.
• Realistic continuous improvement is a better plan

Understanding Accommodations and Responsibilities

• With adequate notice, most faculty will provide students with reasonable accommodations to assist students in succeeding in test situations.
• If you need accommodations, you are responsible for understanding what your specific needs are and communicating your needs with your instructors.
• Testing accommodations may allow for additional time on the test, the use of a scribe to record exam answers, the use of a computer instead of handwriting answers, as well as other means to make the test situation successful.

Prioritizing Time Surrounding Test Situations

• If your instructor conducts some sort of pre-exam summary or prep session, make sure to attend.

Test Day

• Once you get to the exam session, try your best to focus on nothing but the exam.

Arriving to class:

• Get to the testing location a few minutes early so you can settle into your place and take a few relaxing breaths.
• Don’t let other classmates interrupt your calmness at this point.
• Just get to your designated place, take out whatever supplies and materials you are allowed to have, and calm your mind.

Taking the test:

• Listen carefully for any last-minute oral directions that may have changed some detail on the exam, such as the timing or the content of the questions.
• As soon as you receive the exam sheet or packet, make a quick scan over the entire test.
• Using this first review, decide how you will allocate your available time for each section.
• Answer every required question on the exam.
• If you are taking an exam that contains multiple-choice questions, go through and answer the questions about which you are the most confident first.
• Allow yourself a few minutes at the end of the exam session to review your answers.
• Finally, make sure you have completed the entire test:
  • check the backs of pages, and verify that you have a corresponding answer section for every question section on the exam.

After the Test

• Once you have your results, study them—whether you did really well (Go, you!) or not as well as you had hoped (Keep your spirits up!).
• A better plan would be to learn from her exam results and analyze both what she did well and where she struggled.
• Going forward in this class, Thandie should practice writing out her explanations of how to compute the problems and talk to her instructor about ways to hone this skill.

Test Anxiety

• Test anxiety is very real.
• Test anxiety, however, can cause us to doubt ourselves so severely that we underperform or overcompensate to the point that we do not do well on the exam.

Understanding Test Anxiety

• Our thinking is a key element of anxiety of any sort.
• You may feel queasy or light-headed if you are experiencing test anxiety.
• At its worst, test anxiety can cause its sufferers to experience several unpleasant conditions including nausea, diarrhea, and shortness of breath.
• We can become very nervous when we think about taking an exam because if we do really poorly, we think, we may have to face consequences as dire as dropping out of school or never graduating.

Using Strategies to Manage Test Anxiety

• One of the best ways to control test anxiety is to be prepared for the exam.
• You can also learn effective relaxation techniques including controlled breathing, visualization, and meditation.
• Many professions require participants to take frequent licensing exams to prove they are staying current in their rapidly changing work environments, including nursing, engineering, education, and architecture, as well as many other occupations.
• Studying and taking tests will always be a large part of college, so learning now to do these well can only help you be more successful.