7 Best Memorization Techniques for Boosting Your Studies
As exam season draws nearer, it is common for students to panic since grasping a whole semester’s work in a short period can be difficult. Having a meaningful understanding of a unit is essential for better performance. Therefore, students need to comprehend and use their memory to remember concepts, formulas, and ideas. So instead of relying on cramming the night before your test, you can focus on advancing your memory. Here are some ways you can improve your memory for better understanding.
Organize Your Study Area
Free your space from any distractions to boost your concentration. Clutter and disorder have a progressive effect on the brain. A constant visualization of messiness lowers the ability to comprehend, affecting information processing and leading to low study input. Therefore, if you want to focus and grasp more concepts, ensure you clean and organize your study area.
Use Mnemonics and Abbreviations
While studying, you need to make your work easy, especially if your exams are drawing nearer. Simplifying your studies makes learning more enjoyable. It also makes more comprehensive coverage of your syllabus in a short time. Therefore, it is best to create mnemonics and develop patterns and words to summarize the concept you need. Associating each item’s first letter with a phrase or rhyme works best if you want to master items in a list or orderly information. If possible, link the concepts to your favorite song by replacing the lyrics with what you want to remember.
Utilize Image Associations
Memorizing concepts is much easier when you associate them with pictures. A good example is associating presidents’ names with their physical features. Such pictures stimulate your brain and can be stored in your long-term memory. When information is stored in the long-term memory, it becomes useful to you since you can use it for several years without reading from scratch again. It is best to choose relatable images. To avoid confusion when trying to remember the content learned.
Link the Information
It is best to link concepts to existing information that you already know of when reading. For example, when trying to master the idea that water boils at 222 degrees Celsius at sea level, you can relate it to your school registration number. Such crazy connections will help you memorize concepts quickly without much frustration.
Conduct a Self-Exam
As you go on with your revision, you can set some questions to use for your test after you have completed going through different topics. After reading, you can answer the questions without referring to your notes to check whether you have mastered the concept. You will identify some of the weak areas you need to work on through self-tests.
For self-exam, you can also include essay questions that you can handle without getting essay writing help. It will help ensure you are also preparing for your essay writing assignments.
Exercise Regularly
Exercising has an impact on the neurons that relate to your memory. Therefore, to boost your memory and learning capabilities, it is best to do physical exercises regularly. Exercising also helps you manage anxiety and stress, which may lower your concentration.
Choose an exercise that works best for you and one that you can create a routine around. For example, if you are a morning person, you can wake up early, take a brisk walk, do some cycling, or do morning runs.
Join a Discussion Group
Getting information from your peers may be essential since they may break it down into simple facts. Studying alone can be hectic and tiresome. However, groups make learning more interesting since you can gather various points from different schools of thought.
Peer teaching may be more effective since it has a friendly touch. Thus, you may be more open to asking questions and expressing yourself compared to when receiving the same lesson in a physical class with your course instructor. So if you want to take your studies to the next level, you should consider forming a study group.
Closing Remarks
Most of your college units require you to memorize mass amounts of content. It gets even more frustrating if you have several classes with comprehensive syllabus coverage. Fortunately, memorizing is not just for the elite students; you can also work on your skills and make them right. While Boosting your memorization skills, you will expand your working memory and long-term memory access. However, for some, it may be a gradual process. Thus, it would be best to start working on your memorizing skills earlier in the semester to avoid too much pressure and anxiety during exams.