Studying, reading and memory: Creating a Study Schedule that Works

Last week at Summer School 2011, I had a lot of students come to me to ask about improving their study techniques so that they would increase their marks on their exams. So, this posting will be about how you can increase memory retention while reading over module textbooks and other materials and improve your performance. Planning and understanding a little bit about how memory and the mind work help a great deal in this regard. Why? Let's look the mind and memory.

To the left is a beautiful drawing of the brain by Christopher Wren. What I find interesting about this is that Wren, who built St. Paul's Cathedral with all of its architectural complexities, was interested in domed structures at the micro level as well as structures at the macro level. Similar pictures of the brain exist in the drawings of Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci. Studying and drawing the structures of the body has been the standard method for hundreds of years in Western culture of understanding the dynamics of line drawing - particularly depth and proportion. We've been intrigued by these body structures for centuries and we understand some of them better than others. The brain still mystifies us in many ways, but we do have some pretty good understanding of the way memory works. We can use this understanding to improve our retention of materials for exams.

I have emphasized with many of my students the importance of examining the organizational structure of your textbook and connecting it to previously learned knowledge as a way to help retain information for your examinations. However, understanding how the brain itself works can help students realize more effective study strategies. Trying to improve memory function in learning is not a new idea. According to Walker and Schonwetter, mnemonics, or using acronyms, codes or made-up sentences to remember long pieces of oral or written work was developed by the classical Greeks (Success Secrets of University Students 2003: 157.) One example is the sentence: Richard Of York Goes Back In Vain - a nonsense sentence that is formed with words beginning with the first letter of each colour in the visible electromagnetic spectrum. It is used to remember the colours of the spectrum: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet. The nonsense sentence is much easier for your brain to remember than a random collection of colours.

Another example is SQ3R...Survey, Question, Read, Recite and Review. How and why does this study cycle work? To begin with, the technique my father vigorously adhered to - long and exhaustive study sessions leading up to a test - don't really improve the memory at all! In fact, if you study for eight hours at one stretch before your test - instead of, for example, breaking that time down into one hour cycles with 1/2 hour breaks between sessions - you will retain less knowledge than if you carefully planned to Survey, Question, Read, Recite and Review. Why?

Memory is broken up into long term and short term memory. Obviously, when you first encounter information from a text, it will only go into your short term memory. A long pre-exam session over an 8 hour stretch cannot and will not allow that information to be transferred to long term memory. However, the SQ3R cycle repeated several times in one day and preferably over many days and weeks, will lead to the transference of information from short term memory to long term memory.

Let's examine this cycle:

Survey - Read the material over completely. Remember, these exams are comprehensive. Do not assume you know what will be on your exam. Read everything.
Question - Develop key questions about the material.
Read - Find the answers to the questions you have developed.
Recite - Go over the material, reciting it to make sure you understand what you've learned.
Review - Go over all the material again.
Take a 1/2 hour break!!!!!

This study cycle should take you one hour. If you can't review one chapter in one hour, break the chapters down as required. After a break, you can return to your studying again. This technique has many advantages - especially for many MBA/MSc students. Planning ahead, one hour of study time per day is not a waste of time as students so often believe. In fact, these short sessions are very helpful to memory retention and learning. Additionally, students can and should try and tie the information they are learning to previously learned knowledge.

Note: SQ3R was originally developed by Francis Pleasant Robinson in his 1970 book Effective Learning.

Writing Resources: A list and suggestions

Hi, I've made a list of writing resources to help students who need to strengthen their writing. One of the obstacles some students encounter in our programme is a lack of sophistication in their writing. In previous posts, I've spoken about the need to make writing critical and how to use Bloom's Taxonomy. This is different from the sophistication of your sentence and paragraph structures and developing a good argument.

To begin with, I recommend a sophisticated grammar book. I suggest the following:

Hewings, Martin, 2005. Advanced Grammar in Use, 2nd ed. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Buy the edition with the answers and the CD Rom with the supplemental exercises if possible.

Additionally, every student should have a good dictionary and thesaurus. Oxford publishes both these tools. A thesaurus helps build vocabulary and word by suggesting different words with different shades of meaning. Accuracy in language use is very important as well. This is why you should use a good comprehensive dictionary with English spellings. After all, University of Leicester is an English university and English spelling is the standard here. I use the Oxford Concise which I find larger and more accurate than smaller, cheaper dictionaries.

In terms of writing, I suggest the following books as complete guides to proper essay and assignment writing:

Bailey, Stephen, 2006. Academic Writing: A Handbook for International Students, 2nd ed. London : Routledge.

Jordan, R. R., 1999. Academic Writing Course: Study Skills in English, 3rd ed. Harlow : Pearson Educational Limited.

I hope these resources are useful to students with writing issues.

KB