How to study effectively: Memory hacks

April 20, 2017

• Effective Revision

Students at the most demanding universities often realise that at their level, succeeding is neither about being intelligent, nor about getting down to work anymore: it is just as important to know how to study. Knowing the right techniques and being effective can save you a lot of time as well as your grades.

It is important to know that just like we all have different personalities, we all have different learning styles. As a result, just because a particular technique suits your friends, it doesn’t mean that you should force yourself to study in that manner as well, especially if you feel that you are not getting much work done.

In this article series, we introduce some popular studying techniques, tips and tricks which you might find useful. Today, we present some memory hacks.  

Flashcards

Surely, you have already heard of flashcards and probably even used them at some point. We recommend you get back to them in order to practice what you learn in your classes, university lectures, readings or homework. If you like crafting and it helps you unwind, you can create your own flashcards and carry them around in order to practice your memory whenever you have some spare time – on the daily commute or while standing in a queue. However, if you use your computer to study or if you are keen on using your smartphone, we recommend you download an app which can make most of the work for you. We recommend you try Anki: http://ankisrs.net/).

You shouldn’t aim for more than 30 flashcards a day, because your brain just won’t be able to cope with so many new terms. However, even 30 is a very ambitious number, so unless you are in the middle of an intense exam preparation, you can try 5-10 every day. By using flashcards throughout the academic year, you will have learnt most of the material by the time you have to sit exams at the end of the term or year and it will save you a lot of stress!

Spaced repetition

The “forgetting curve”, developed by Herman Ebbinghaus in 1885, predicts the time intervals in which we need to repeat something so that we don’t forget it. He came up with the so called spaced repetition technique: if you can only repeat something a certain amount of times, you should space these repetitions into intervals which vary between minutes and months. Pushing your effectivity to its maximum, you will only need to repeat the things you don’t want to forget just when you are about to forget them.

Working out the right intervals can be problematic, although there is a consensus that you should repeat what you learn immediately afterwards (e.g. after a lecture) and then one day afterwards. Luckily, we have technology. Anki (“memorisation” in Japanese), which we recommended above, is a spaced repetition flashcard program. It uses a spaced repetition algorithm which means that it will show you relevant cards with information that you are about to forget. In this way, all you need to do is put the information you need to learn in the system and it will do the work for you.

Happy memorising!