Memory Improvement Tips for Students

                       Any student knows that memory is crucially important for learning. Generally speaking, when a student has difficulties in learning, they blame their memory. Supposed such blame was true, improving memory would be one of the most essential and earliest things a student should care about and/or do something about.

                In this article, I will share with you some memory improvement tips or strategies that I have personally used in learning. They have helped me to remember what I learn from lectures, classroom discussion, and others. Though they might also for improving memory in general, they are really good for learning, and I believe many students (including you) have probably used some of them too. So without delay, here we go.

1. Revise your lessons

                Revising your lessons is a must, and you can do it each day, week or month. Regularity is the key in lesson revision. The more often you revise your lessons, the better and longer you remember them. Here, the logic is simple and similar to the fact that you automatically remember a lot of scenes in a particular movie that you’ve watched over and over for many times. In my understanding, good students make it their habit to revise their lessons a clear mile before their examination day, which allows them plenty of time to gradually learn and prepare.

                In revision, what you may do are looking at the notes you took in your classes, reading any piece of work in details so as to increase your level of comprehension, doing some exercises, searching for more references or information, and etc.

2. Produce what you’ve absorbed

                Knowledge is one of the world’s renewable resources because the more knowledge you use the more knowledge you have. Some students get confused that they will lose their knowledge if they use it too often. Such thought is completely wrong, in my humble opinion. Knowledge shared is knowledge gained.

            Do you remember the times that your teachers made you rewrite some lessons, say 10 or 20 times? When I was young, my teachers had me rewrite lessons as homework. I sometimes had to write 5 or 10 pages. At the first time, I did not understand why they had to do that to me and really hated them for doing that. But, the more I did it, the more I understood because I remembered what I wrote down. I didn’t have to set aside time to memorize the lessons because I had already understood them from writing.

                I strongly suggest you to produce what you’ve learnt. Never keep it to yourself because knowledge gradually dies if not used. If you learn math, do more exercises. That you learn theories doesn’t necessarily guarantee your ability to tackle the problems or practices. You’ve got to do it often enough to get experience and gain confidence.

3. Use highlighters

                When I mention highlighting, I refer to anything that you can do to make any piece of information stand out. To make certain information spotlighting, you can do many things such as underlining it using pens or pencils, circling it using pens or pencils, highlighting it using markers or highlighters, writing in the margins, writing on paper stickers, folding tips of papers (as to remember the page), and etc.

                The reason we should highlight important information or main concepts is that our attention tends to be drawn to those highlighted words, phrases or sentences, thus making us remember them longer than those not-highlighted.

4. Use senses to help your memory

                In my experience, memory is pretty much related to your senses, and definitely you can use your senses to help you retain certain information. For instance, I am an audio-visual kind of learner. So, I use sound and sight to help me learn. I usually make some graphs or record my voice so as to listen later, especially for revision or reflection. Supposed my teacher had used similar graphs in the test, I would be able to handle the test quite easily because information just flows into my head when I see the graphs.

                For sure, you might not be able to use all the senses at once to help you improve your memory or learn something. But, you can use those that seem so related in the situation. If you are learning how to cook, you can use smell, touch or sight to help you. If you are learning math, you can use sight. Using senses to help your memory really works. (Do you still remember your ABC song?)

5. Use shortcuts

                Your brain works extremely hard daily, and it might get exhausted sometimes. So you need tricks or techniques to empower it. One of these powerful and practical tricks is mnemonics. I’m not going to elaborate more on this, but mnemonics is a strategy to make long phrases or sentences short. For example, ‘WWW’ is for ‘World Wide Web’.

                Using shortcuts or mnemonics really helps especially when you want remember main concepts or key words. If you use it properly, it will help you a lot in your exams.