6.4 Strengthening Your Memory

• What strategies help us remember and learn information best?

Rehearsal

One strategy is rehearsal, or the conscious repetition of information to be remembered (Craik & Watkins, 1973). This strategy is linked to studying material frequently for shorter periods of time. You may not remember when or how you learned skills like riding a bike or tying your shoes. Mastery came with practice, and at some point, the skills became second nature. Academic learning is no different: if you spend enough time with important course concepts and practice them often, you will know them in the same way you know how to ride a bike, almost without thinking about them. For example, think about how you learned your multiplication tables. You may recall that 6 x 6 = 36, 6 x 7 = 42, and 6 x 8 = 48. Memorizing these facts is rehearsal.

Incorporate visuals

Visual aids like note cards, concept maps, and highlighted text are ways of making information stand out. Because they are shorter and more concise, they have the advantage of making the information to be memorized seem more manageable and less daunting (than an entire textbook chapter, for example). Some students write key terms on note cards and hang them around their desk or mirror so that they routinely see them and study them without even trying.

Create mnemonics

Memory devices known as mnemonics can help you retain information while only needing to remember a unique phrase or letter pattern that stands out. Mnemonic devices are memory aids that help us organize information for encoding. They are especially useful when we want to recall larger bits of information such as steps, stages, phases, and parts of a system (Bellezza, 1981).

There are different types of mnemonic devices, such as the acronym. An acronym is a word formed by the first letter of each of the words you want to remember. For example, even if you live near one, you might have difficulty recalling the names of all five Great Lakes. What if I told you to think of the word Homes? HOMES is an acronym that represents Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior: the five Great Lakes.

Another type of mnemonic device is an acrostic: you make a phrase of all the first letters of the words. For example, if you are taking a math test and you are having difficulty remembering the order of operations, recalling the sentence “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally” will help you, because the order of mathematical operations is Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction. There also are jingles, which are rhyming tunes that contain keywords related to the concept, such as “i before e, except after c.”

Chunking

Another strategy is chunking, where you organize information into manageable bits or chunks (Bodie, Powers, & Fitch-Hauser, 2006). Chunking is useful when trying to remember information like dates and phone numbers. Instead of trying to remember 5205550467, you remember the number as 520-555-0467. So, if you met an interesting person at a party and you wanted to remember his phone number, you would naturally chunk it, and you could repeat the number over and over, combining the strategies of chunking and rehearsal.

Connect new information to prior knowledge

Take stock of what you already know—information that is already stored in long-term memory—and use it as a foundation for learning newer information. It is easier to remember new information if you can connect it to old information or to a familiar frame of reference. For example, if you are taking a sociology class and are learning about different types of social groups, you may be able to think of examples from your own experiences that relate to the different types.

1. Give a personal or practical example of how you could use two of the memory strategies while you are studying.
2. How does connecting new information to prior knowledge help improve memory?