When I was a year 9 student preparing for my first-ever set of milestone exams, it was nothing short of dreadful. I still vividly remember sitting at a desk in Howick Library where I reread all my social studies notes and kept repeating the information to myself until everything was forced inside my head. Luckily, I avoided failing the exam but I knew from then on that five years of rereading notes in a library was not the way to excel in academics.

But like all things in life, you live and you learn. Thankfully, with the help of scientific discoveries as well as an abundance of resources on the internet from YouTube videos to articles on study advice, there is now a plethora of techniques out there that can yield amazing results when it comes to memory retention.

Visualisation

Visualisation refers to the formation of a mental image of quite literally anything – a simple concept yet a powerful tool in helping you memorise information.

The effectiveness of visualisation is the result of our brains, which tend to form memories as images. If you were to hear somebody say “Rubik’s Cube” for instance, the first thing to come up in your head is probably going to be a Rubik’s Cube because that is the image your brain associates with the word.

Thankfully, this also works for more abstract concepts which is especially useful when memorising information for exams. Say you are an economics student and you are asked to memorise the characteristics of a recession (See fig 1.1).

• Recession/Troughs
  • Declining economic growth
  • Higher unemployment
  • Fall in consumer and business confidence
  • Destocking and discounting
  • Demand for imports fall
  • Fall in housing prices or construction

Chances are, you will have a tough time trying to memorise each line on the list and even if you do, you would likely have to rehearse it constantly to keep it in your short-term memory.

Visualisation in this case provides a much more efficient alternative. Take the definition of a recession first – two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. If you were to think about these traits, the first thing to come up in your head would probably be some image of people suffering during the Great Depression or COVID-19 Pandemic. Economic downturn, people losing their jobs left and right, and consumers desperately saving their money.

• Recession/Troughs
  • Economic downturn —> Declining economic growth
  • People losing their jobs —> Higher unemployment, Fall in housing prices or construction
  • Consumers desperately saving (which lowers spending) —> Fall in consumer and business confidence, Destocking and discounting, Demand for imports fall

In doing so, this has allowed you to essentially hit all the points in the flashcards above. Of course, you don’t have to create a whole memory palace in the back of your head but putting in some effort to turn words into pictures can really help with memorisation.

Chunking

As the name of this technique suggests, chunking involves breaking up bigger pieces of information into smaller ones or “chunks” that are more manageable to remember.

If you are asked to name the countries of the world, you would probably go by continents as opposed to jumping across the globe for every country you name since it is easier to sort the information out this way.

Or think about your phone number, reading it aloud mentally. You most likely recalled it in your head as two groups of three digits and one group of five digits.

This time, let’s pretend that you are a physics student.

• State the SUVAT equations
  • v = u + at
  • s = ut + (1/2)at^2
  • s = vt – (1/2)at^2
  • s = (v+u)/2 * t
  • v^2 = u^2 + 2as

Above is a whole list of weird-looking equations which if you were to just stare at as a piece of text, have virtually no meaning.

The great psychologist George A. Miller discovered that people can usually store about 7 (plus minus 2) pieces of information in their short-term memory. As a result, if you were asked to just memorise all five equations, you would likely end up rehearsing the information over and over again as you try to retain it in your short-term memory.

Chunking allows people to group information so that rather than trying to recall them all individually, it becomes possible to recall in groups. Taking our example above, you could easily group the middle three equations into ones that solve for s while the other two solve for v and v^2. Two of the equations for s can further be categorised into “(blank) +- (1/2at)^2“. Now all of a sudden, what appeared to be five daunting equations has been simplified into several sizeable chunks that put a lighter cognitive load on the brain,

Spaced Repetition

German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus famously pioneered the field of memory through his proposition of the forgetting curve. Fig 1 shows the forgetting curve, illustrating that over time, the retention of memories decreases.

But thanks to Ebbinghaus who conducted an experiment where he memorised nonsense syllables, he found that the more he practised, practised over increasingly spaced out intervals after initially learning them, the less time it took to relearn forgotten information and the flatter the forgetting curve became.

So what does this suggest? Firstly, Ebbinghaus’ study shows long-term memory retention improves with spaced repetition. Secondly, reviewing the material at the right time, particularly when you naturally forget them involves spacing out the study intervals for more familiar information while maintaining a shorter study interval for less familiar information.

Active Recall

In a nutshell, active recall involves summarising information into questions rather than notes and then answering these questions without external assistance.

This essentially simulates an exam setting, forcing you to retrieve information from only what is in your head, which ensures you make the information stick rather than developing a false sense of confidence by referring to notes or Google.

Putting everything together

With all these techniques in mind, how do you actually begin to implement them?

I would highly recommend taking advantage of today’s digital technologies and finding an app that allows you to create flashcards with built-in spaced repetition software. This way, you can create flashcards in mere seconds by typing without having to go through the painful process of cutting out cards to write on.

RemNote and Anki for instance are great examples of these apps, allowing you to make flashcards, forcing you to actively recall information over spaced-out study sessions. To make the most of these flashcards, you can then implement chunking when organising your answers and visualisation either through attaching images to flashcards or trying to imagine them in your head as you study.

With several studying softwares available at the click of your fingers, you can start today. So make a start and best of luck for all your future exams!

30th August 2024
Written by Aaron Huang, edited by Emma Li
Photography by SCREEN POST on Unsplash