Learning Strategies: How one study tip can dramatically improve your memory
This important strategy should help improve your learning efficiency and memory. It’s presented in college student context, but of course applies to anyone looking for a good study tip.
Imagine that a psychology lecture has just let out. The vast majority of students will wait several weeks to review their lecture notes. Unfortunately, when they do so, very little of what they’ve written will make sense. The notes will be difficult to follow, and the content hard to understand. They might as well be seeing the material for the first time. Why? The answer is simple: Their memory of the material has long since decayed.
Why does forgetting happen?
Most students incorrectly believe that after learning new information, they steadily forget a little bit each and every day that passes.
This is a myth. Actually, newly learned information has a relatively short half-life in your brain. This fact is demonstrated very nicely by the forgetting curve.
The forgetting curve is not a new phenomenon. German psychologists (e.g., Herman Ebbinghaus) were plotting these curves 150 years ago. Since that time, a great deal of accumulated data has supported their validity. Take a look at the forgetting curve shown here:
The peak of the curve (T) represents your memory for material immediately after the learning session—let’s say the end of a lecture. Now, we can conclude 2 things from the curve: The Obvious and the Not-so-Obvious.
The Obvious:
We can see it makes no sense to wait until midterms or final exams to do your first review (that is, to wait until Day 30 or longer on the above graph). By that time, you’ll have forgotten more than 95 percent of the material. You’ll feel as if you’re encountering the information in your notes for the first time, and what should take you only 4 minutes to review will now take you 40 minutes. The notes will look foreign because you won’t remember anything.
Not-so-Obvious:
However, there’s a more important conclusion we can reach from the curve: You don’t have to wait several weeks for this degree of forgetting to occur. Massive forgetting actually happens within hours of the initial learning session. Therefore, even those students who wait several days to review the material are in trouble! If you look carefully at the graph, you can see that even before Day 2 arrives, you will already have forgotten 40–70 percent of what you learned!
The crucial point is this: Make sure to review new material within hours of any initial learning episode.
The vast majority of students could save dozens of hours of study time per semester by using this one technique alone to markedly improve learning efficiency and memory.
Notice how a small investment up front pays huge dividends come exam time.
It is also worth noting that these recommendations apply not only to lectures, but to any academic learning—whether from a textbook, video, or computer learning session.
Tags: academic, college, Ebbinghaus, final-exams, forgetting-curves, learning-efficiency, lecture-notes, midterms, psychologist, textbook
Had I come across this article 14 years back !
Thank God! i will not regret after 14 years for not knowing this…
I have read about this in Tony Buzan’s book “Use your head.” While you do explain the problem of not reviewing shortly after a lesson, you do not give enough information to maintain newly learned information.
Assume I do review an hour after a lesson, what is the forgetting rate after that review? What’s the forgetting rate after the third review? How many reviews and periods and terms do I have to do in order to not forget?
Sure I might review after an hour, but by the time I review again I might have forgotten 40% of what I reviewed.
Tony Buzan states that your review pattern should go like this:
Review 1 – 10 minutes after lesson for 10 minutes
Rev. 2 – A day after lesson for 4 min.
Rev. 3- A week after lesson for 4 min.
4 – A month after for 4min.
5- 6 months after for 4 min.
6 – A year after lesson for 4 minutes.
By that time it should be in your subconscious.
Another important and relative issue is taking down notes. What good is reviewing if you didn’t get everything down? Suppose your notes are only 80% of what was actually taught, that means you really only review 80% of the actual lesson content. Buzan suggests you use mindmaps as they are better for getting down more information and creating assosciations.
Nir- Thanks for stopping by. I do not give specific time frames for review patterns simply because this will vary for:
1) each person
2) complexity/type of material to be learned
3) quantity of material learned
Additionally, there are probably dozens if not hundreds of other factors that influence review patterns; i.e. time of day, level of fatigue, whether you drank coffee, etc…
Nonetheless, the specific numbers you post can serve as useful but general guidelines that students and others can use to help devise their own study program.
Regarding Mind Maps, they are tremendously helpful, and I know of many students now-a-days that incorporate them into their notes. Personally, I am a huge fan of MindJet’s MindManager mind mapping program, and have been using it on an almost daily basis for the past 5 years.
[...] Learning Strategies: How one study tip can significantly improve your memory [...]
[...] Ceux qui comptent sur la mémoire jouent avec le feu. Car le cerveau consume l’information avec une efficacité infernale. Par conséquent, les élèves n’ont pas seulement besoin de méthode pour optimiser la mémorisation, mais aussi de motivation. Tant mieux si on peut faire d’une pierre deux coups en utilisant la courbe type d’oubli pour les conscientiser à l’importance de la méthode (Smartkit : Learning Strategies: How one study tip can dramatically improve your memory). [...]