All of us desire to possess an excellent memory system that is robust and dependable. But students who are stressed during examinations face situations
of memory failures that lead to anxiety and embarrassment. Our memory has the capacity to store all information that we acquire through learning and experience. It is the memory system that registers information from each of the senses with reasonable accuracy. Information is primarily encoded acoustically, in terms of sound and unless rehearsed continuously, it may get lost in less than 30 seconds, because the short term memory is fragile, so the information decays automatically in less than a second. It has been shown that once any information enters the long-term memory store it is never forgotten because it gets encoded semantically, in terms of the meaning that any information carries. What you experience as forgetting is in fact retrieval failure. All information that our senses receive are not registered; if that be the case, imagine the kind of pressure that our memory system will have to cope. Therefore, to avoid such failures rehearsals should be performed in-order to maintain information through repetition and when such repetitions discontinue, the information is lost. Why do we forget? Is it because the information we commit to our long-term memory is somehow lost? Is it because we did not memorise it well enough? Is it because we did not encode the information correctly or Is it because during storage, it got distorted or misplaced? The rate of forgetting is maximum in the first nine hours, particularly during the first hour. After that the rate slows down and not much is forgotten even after many days. There are at least two kinds of interferences that may result in forgetting. Interference can be proactive (forward moving) which means what you have learnt earlier interferes with the recall of your subsequent learning or retroactive (backward moving) which refers to difficulty in recalling what you have learnt earlier because of learning a new material. Many hardworking and ambitious students aspire for high scores in final examinations and to achieve such ends they put in long hours in studies. But when they receive the question paper, they become extremely nervous and forget everything they had prepared well. Contents of memory may become inaccessible either due to absence or inappropriateness of retrieval cues that are available/employed at the time of recall. The following are few study cue methods for last minute preparation for students with exam fear CHUNKING- Chunking can increase the capacity of short-term memory. In chunking, several smaller units are combined to form large chunks. For creating chunks, it is important to discover some organisation principles, which can link. Smaller units. Therefore, apart from being a control mechanism to increase the capacity of short-term memory, chunking can be used to improve memory as well. Through chunking it is possible to expand the capacity of short term memory. For example, if you are told to remember a string of digits such as 194719492004 you may create the chunks as 1947, 1949, and 2004 and remember them as the year when India became independent, the year when the Indian Constitution was adopted, and the year when the tsunami hit the coastal regions of India and South East Asian countries. ASSOCIATIONS- The number of associations you can create around the new information will determine its permanence. For example, the task of remembering the meaning of the word ‘humanity’ will be easier if the meanings of concepts such as ‘compassion’, ‘truth’ and ‘benevolence’ are already in place. To remember the following list of individual digits: 1 9 2 5 4 9 8 1 1 2 1 Memorise them in the following groups: 1 9 25 49 81 121 Finally, memorise them in the following manner:12 32 52 72 92 112 Analysing information in terms of its structural and phonetic features amounts to shallower processing while encoding it in terms of the meaning it carries leads to memory that resists forgetting considerably. While you are learning a new lesson, you must focus on elaborating the meaning of its contents in as much detail as possible and must not depend on rote memorisation. Suppose you have to memorise a list of words like hut, wasp, cottage, gold, bronze, ant, etc. in which words belonged to six categories (like places of living, names of insects, types of metal, etc.). Category names in this example act as retrieval cues. Besides category names, the physical context in which you learn also provides effective retrieval cues. MNEMONICS USING IMAGES Mnemonics using images require that you create vivid and interacting images of and around the material you wish to remember. By visualizing a specific picture, you can easily recall information that you previously associated with that image. For ex- Associating numbers with shapes (0=egg, 1=candle), using a dromedary's humps to represent the letter "D". KEYWORD METHOD For ex- To remember the Spanish word Pasto Word: Pasto (Spanish for "grass") Keyword: Pasta Image: Visualize pasta noodles growing in a field like grass. To remember the Spanish word Carta Word: Carta (Spanish for "letter") Keyword: Cart Image: A shopping cart filled with mail. METHOD OF LOCI The method of loci involves visualizing a familiar environment, such as a room in your house, or a path you walk every day, and mentally placing the items or pieces of information you want to remember at different locations within that environment. The loci method is a strategy of memory enhancement which uses visualizations of familiar spatial environments to enhance the recall of information For ex- To remember the grocery list (milk, bread, eggs), you might imagine a giant milk carton at the front door, bread lining the hallway, and eggs cracking on the kitchen counter, then mentally "walk" through your home to recall them in order. This technique links abstracts info to concrete locations, making recall easier. MNEMONICS USING ORGANISATION Organisation refers to imposing certain order on the material you want to remember. Mnemonics of this kind are helpful because of the framework you create while organisation makes the retrieval task fairly easy. For ex - To remember the planets in order “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Noodles” MVEMJSUN M - My V -Very E - Educated M - Mother J - Just S - Served U - Us N – Noodles To remember the “five Great Lakes” (Michigan, Huron, Superior, Ontario, Erie,) HOMES H - Huron O - Ontario M - Michigan E - Erie S – Superior FIRST LETTER TECHNIQUE: In order to employ the first letter technique, you need to pick up the first letter of each word you want to remember and arrange them to form another word or a sentence. For example, colours of a rainbow are remembered in this way (VIBGYOR- that stands for Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red). Although there are many techniques to enhance study techniques it is suggested that one must: ENGAGE IN DEEP LEVEL PROCESSING: If you want to memorise any information well, engage in deep level processing. Processing information in terms of meaning that they convey leads to better memory as compared to attending to their surface features. Deep processing would involve asking as many questions related to the information as possible, considering its meaning and examining its relationships to the facts you already know. In this way, the new information will become a part of your existing knowledge framework and the chances that it will be remembered are increased. MINIMISE INTERFERENCE: Interference, as we have read, is a major cause of forgetting and therefore you should try to avoid it as much as possible. You know that maximum interference is caused when very similar materials are learned in a sequence. Avoid this. Arrange your study in such a way that you do not learn similar subjects one after the other. Instead, pick up some other subject unrelated to the previous one. If that is not possible, distribute your learning/practice. This means giving yourself intermittent rest periods while studying to minimise interference. Give yourself enough retrieval cues: While you learn something, think of retrieval cues inherent in your study material. Identify them and link parts of the study material to these cues. Cues will be easier to remember compared to the entire content and the links you have created between cues and the content will facilitate the retrieval process. Method of PQRST: This acronym stands for Preview, Question, Read, Self-recitation, and Test. Preview refers to giving a cursory look at the chapter and familiarising oneself with its contents. Question means raising questions and seeking answers from the lesson. Read and look for answers of questions you had raised. After reading try to rewrite what you have read Test how much you have been able to understand. To conclude there is no one method that can solve all problems related to retention and bring about an overnight memory improvement. In order to improve your memory, you need to attend to a wide variety of factors which affect your memory such as your health status, your interest and motivation, your familiarity with the subject matter and so on. In addition, you must learn to use strategies for memory improvement depending upon the nature of memory tasks you are required to accomplish. (This is authored by Deanna Mary Fugle - Counsellor, JAIN International Residential School (JIRS), Bengaluru)
