SQ4R – How to study outline

S – Survey

Q – Question

R – Read

R – wRite

R – Recite

R – Review

 

 

Improving your memory

Do you forget people’s names at the worst moments?

Are you ever asked a question, and you should know the answer, but you struggle to form an intelligent reply?

These are common instances where a good memory is important.

Memory is more than recalling information for exams or trivia games. It’s an important work skill that you can develop and improve. Whether it’s remembering key statistics during a negotiation, or quoting a precedent-setting action when making a decision, or impressing clients with your knowledge of their product lines – your ability to remember is a major advantage.

People with good memories are often seen as knowledgeable, smart, competent, and dependable. And there are many techniques you can use to develop your own ability to remember information – and then recall it when and where you need it.

Take Care of Your Health

The basis for a good memory is a healthy mind and body. You can’t expect your brain to function at its best if you don’t take care of the body that feeds it. Here are some key issues that you need to address:

• Eat well – Make sure key vitamins are in your diet, including folic acid, vitamin B12, and antioxidants. These improve the sharpness of the mind. If necessary, take vitamin supplements.
• Drink plenty of water – Most of us are dehydrated and don’t even know it. When you don’t drink enough water, your body and mind become weak and tired. Water makes red blood cells more active and gives you more energy.
• Get enough sleep – During sleep, your brain recharges itself. Studies have shown that your brain needs sleep to change new memories into long-term memories.
• Manage stress effectively – Ongoing stress has many harmful health effects. Learn to limit and control the stress in your life. Use physical relaxation techniques  , thought awareness and rational positive thinking  , andimagery   to reduce your levels of stress.
• Don’t smoke – Limit caffeine and alcohol use (excessive alcohol can seriously affect your short term memory). Get enough exercise.

These basic health tips allow you to maximize your brain’s abilities.

Use Mnemonics

Mnemonics   are simple memory-improving tools that help you connect everyday, easy-to-remember items and ideas to information you want to remember. Later, by recalling these everyday items, you can also recall what you wanted to remember.

There are many mnemonic techniques:

• The Number/Rhyme Technique   – This allows you to remember ordered lists. Start with a standard word that rhymes with the number (we recommend 1 – Bun, 2 – Shoe, 3 – Tree, 4 – Door, 5 – Hive, 6 – Bricks, 7 – Heaven, 8 – Gate, 9 – Line, 10 – Hen). Then create an image that associates each with the thing you’re trying to remember. To remember a list of South American countries using number/rhyme, you might start with:
  • One – Bun/Colombia: A BUN with the COLUMn of a Greek temple coming out of it.
  • Two – Shoe/Venezuela: VENus de Milo coming out of the sea on a SHOE.
  • Three – Tree/Guyana: Friends call GUY and ANnA sitting in a TREE.
  • Four – Door/Ecuador: A DOOR in the shape of a circle/globe with a golden EQUAtOR running around it.
• The Number/Shape System   – Here, create images that relate to the shape of each number, and connect those images to the items in your list. Let’s use the same example:
  • One – Spear/Columbia: The shaft of the SPEAR is a thin marble COLUMn.
  • Two – Swan/Venezuela: This time, VENus is standing on the back of a SWAN.
  • Three – Bifocal Glasses/Guyana: GUY has just trodden on ANnA’s bifocals. She’s quite cross!
  • Four – Sailboat/Ecuador: The boat is sailing across the golden line of the EQUAtOR on a globe.
• The Alphabet Technique   – This works well for lists of more than 9 or 10 items (beyond 10, the previous techniques can get too difficult). With this system, instead of finding a word that rhymes with the number, you associate the things you want to remember with a particular letter of the alphabet, from A to Z. This is an efficient way to remember an ordered list of up to 26 items.
• The Journey System   – In your mind, think about a familiar journey or trip: For example, you might go from your office to your home. Associate the things that you want to remember with each landmark on your journey. With a long enough, well-enough known journey, you can remember a lot of things!
• The Roman Room System   (Loci Method) – This technique uses location to stimulate your memory. Connect your list with items you see in a familiar room or location. You might find associations with things in your kitchen, in your office, or at a familiar grocery store.

Our Bite-Sized Training session Remember! will help you to review and practice some of these mnemonic techniques.

Mind Mapping

Mind maps   (also called concept maps or memory maps) are an effective way to link ideas and concepts in your brain, and then “see” the connections firsthand. Mind mapping is a note-taking technique that records information in a way that shows you how various pieces of information fit together. There’s a lot of truth in the saying “A picture speaks a thousand words”, and mind maps create an easily-remembered “picture” of the information you’re trying to remember.

This technique is very useful to summarize and combine information from a variety of sources. It also allows you to think about complex problems in an organized manner, and then present your findings in a way that shows the details as well as the big picture.

The mind map itself is a useful end product. However, the process of creating the map is just as helpful for your memory. Fitting all the pieces together, and looking for the connections, forces you to really understand what you’re studying – and it keeps you from trying to simply memorize.

Challenge Your Brain

As with other parts of your body, your mind needs exercise. You can exercise your brain by using it in different ways, on a regular basis. Try the following:

• Learn a new skill or start a hobby – Find activities that build skills you don’t normally use in your daily life. For example, if you work with numbers all day, develop your creative side with art classes or photography.
• Use visualization on a regular basis – Since much of memory involves associating and recalling images, it’s important to build this skill. Get plenty of practice with this!
• Keep active socially – When you communicate and interact with people, you have to be alert. This helps keep your brain strong and alive.
• Focus on the important things – You can’t possibly remember everything, so make sure you give your brain important things to do – and don’t overload it with “waste.” The “garbage in, garbage out” philosophy works well here.

  Tip:

  While it’s important to develop a good memory, remembering unnecessary things (such as tasks you need to do, or things you need to buy) is hard work. What’s more, because these consume short-term memory, they can diminish your ability to concentrate on other things. They can also leave you stressed, as you struggle to remember all of the things you have to do.

  Write these things down on your to-do list  ! This way, you don’t have to remember everything. And if your memory fails, you know where to look for the information you need.

• Keep your brain active with memory games   and puzzles – Try Sudoku, chess, Scrabble, and Word Twist as well as trivia games, pair matching, and puzzles. These are popular ways to practice memorization while having fun. And explore brain-training sites like Lumosity as a way of pepping up your mind.

Key Points

Your memory is a valuable asset that you should protect and develop. Even if you no longer have to memorize information for exams, the ability to remember quickly and accurately is always important.

Whether it’s remembering the name of someone you met at a conference last month, or recalling the sales figure from last quarter, you must rely on your memory. Learn and practice the above techniques to keep your mind healthy.

You have only one brain – so treat it well, give it lots of exercise, and don’t take it for granted. You never know when you’ll need its skills to be at their best!

Source: http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newISS_95.htm

Memory Techniques

Introduction to Memory Techniques

Use your whole mind to remember.

© iStockphoto/Yakobchuk

The tools in this section help you to improve your memory. They help you both to remember facts accurately and to remember the structure of information.

The tools are split into two sections. Firstly you’ll learn the memory techniques themselves. Secondly we’ll look at how you can use them in practice to remember peoples names, languages, exam information, and so on.

As with other mind tools, the more practice you give yourself with these techniques, the more effectively you will use them. This section contains many of the memory techniques used by stage memory performers. With enough practice and effort, you may be able to have a memory as good. Even if you do not have the time needed to develop this quality of memory, many of the techniques here are useful in everyday life.

Mnemonics

‘Mnemonic’ is another word for memory tool. Mnemonics are techniques for remembering information that is otherwise quite difficult to recall: A very simple example is the ’30 days hath September’ rhyme for remembering the number of days in each calendar month.

The idea behind using mnemonics is to encode difficult-to-remember information in a way that is much easier to remember.

Our brains evolved to code and interpret complex stimuli such as images, colors, structures, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, positions, emotions and language. We use these to make sophisticated models of the world we live in. Our memories store all of these very effectively.

Unfortunately, a lot of the information we have to remember in modern life is presented differently – as words printed on a page. While writing is a rich and sophisticated medium for conveying complex arguments, our brains do not easily encode written information, making it difficult to remember.

This section of Mind Tools shows you how to use all the memory resources available to you to remember information in a highly efficient way.

Using Your Whole Mind to Remember

The key idea is that by coding information using vivid mental images, you can reliably code both information and the structure of information. And because the images are vivid, they are easy to recall when you need them.

The techniques explained later on in this section show you how to code information vividly, using stories, strong mental images, familiar journeys, and so on.

You can do the following things to make your mnemonics more memorable:

• Use positive, pleasant images. Your brain often blocks out unpleasant ones.
• Use vivid, colorful, sense-laden images – these are easier to remember than drab ones.
• Use all your senses to code information or dress up an image. Remember that your mnemonic can contain sounds, smells, tastes, touch, movements and feelings as well as pictures.
• Give your image three dimensions, movement and space to make it more vivid. You can use movement either to maintain the flow of association, or to help you to remember actions.
• Exaggerate the size of important parts of the image.
• Use humor! Funny or peculiar things are easier to remember than normal ones.
• Similarly, rude rhymes are very difficult to forget!
• Symbols (red traffic lights, pointing fingers, road signs, etc.) can code quite complex messages quickly and effectively.

Designing Mnemonics: Imagination, Association and Location

The three fundamental principles underlying the use of mnemonics are imagination, association and location. Working together, you can use these principles to generate powerful mnemonic systems.

Imagination: is what you use to create and strengthen the associations needed to create effective mnemonics. Your imagination is what you use to create mnemonics that are potent for you. The more strongly you imagine and visualize a situation, the more effectively it will stick in your mind for later recall. The imagery you use in your mnemonics can be as violent, vivid, or sensual as you like, as long as it helps you to remember.

Association: this is the method by which you link a thing to be remembered to a way of remembering it. You can create associations by:

• Placing things on top of each other.
• Crashing things together.
• Merging images together.
• Wrapping them around each other.
• Rotating them around each other or having them dancing together.
• Linking them using the same color, smell, shape, or feeling.
• As an example, you might link the number 1 with a goldfish by visualizing a 1-shaped spear being used to spear it.

Location: gives you two things: a coherent context into which you can place information so that it hangs together, and a way of separating one mnemonic from another. By setting one mnemonic in a particular town, I can separate it from a similar mnemonic set in a city. For example, by setting one in Wimbledon and another similar mnemonic with images of Manhattan, we can separate them with no danger of confusion. You can build the flavors and atmosphere of these places into your mnemonics to strengthen the feeling of location.

Source: http://www.mindtools.com/memory.html

Developing study skills in your child

Middle school is recognized by most authorities as a crucial period in a student’s life. You are at the point where schoolwork is becoming more difficult, and your grades are being counted on your official transcript. These factors alone are formidable, but classwork is also becoming more involved and abstract, and students are being asked to use their brains in ways analytical and intuitive that they may not have yet been called on to develop. Because this period in your life marks your passage into the adult world of practical knowledge, reasoning, and career study, it is important that you cultivate an effective method of learning and reviewing information that allows you to truly understand it. By acknowledging the following factors, you can develop the skills needed to absorb and apply information in class. Once you’ve mastered these techniques, you’ll probably also want to check out Secrets Smart Students Know; this great little book has lots of tips that will help you study faster and improve your memory.

1. Create an appropriate study environment. Many students have a difficult time keeping up with their studies merely because they feel frustrated and uncomfortable when they sit down to begin them. In order to have an encouraging and fruitful experience when studying, you must be in an environment that allows for full concentration.

   The first thing that any student appreciates when studying is an open, organized studying surface, such as a large desk or table. A desk with drawers or some plastic tubs that can be stored near the table will allow you to have your resources close by. It is to be stressed that the study area be open–having the space to spread out books and papers will minimize frustration. Furthermore, a focused study environment requires quiet and no distractions. The usual “supplies” that are brought to the study area–a CD player, snack food, etc.–are discouraged. These things break concentration and take time away from studies. The student should know that study time is study time, and should eat before or after–not during–his work. Other factors that create a good study environment are good lighting and comfortable furniture.

2. Develop a calm attitude. Studying also requires the correct attitude. Be calm and patient with yourself as you review the material. Beating yourself up will do no good. Try to open your mind as much as possible by putting other things aside and dispelling frustration.
3. Take good notes (and pay attention in class). Class time is when much of learning takes place. Pay attention during class, and don’t expect to learn everything later on your own. As a student moves through middle school and into high school, lectures will become more crucial to the grade and in-class participation will often count for points. Paying attention in class familiarizes you with the material, and taking notes firms it up until further studying solidifies it. Some good note-taking strategies are:
   • Using abbreviations or symbols for commonly used words (e.g. mlcl for molecule, w/ for “with,” the Greek letter delta for the concept of change).
   • Singling out the most important information for the record (main ideas, necessary details).
   • Using clear headers to organize information.
   • Drawing pictures or diagrams rather than expressing “visual concepts” in words.
4. Develop effective memorization methods. While memorization is far from being all you’ll need in middle school and high school, it is often called into use. MindTools is a website which details many memory techniques. The following is a list of some common techniques to improve your memory:
5. 1. • List: When memorizing dates, formulae, etc., some find useful the most bare method of all–the list. When memorizing the scientific names of different organisms for a biology class, for instance, a student could create two columns side by side–one listing the common names, the other listing the scientific names. By reading the list over several times and then covering up pieces of information so that you are forced to remember them, you can teach your brain to associate the two names more quickly.
      • Flash cards: Flash cards are a valuable resource as well. They work much like a list, but instead of putting the corresponding information in two columns, you can use index cards (or paper, etc.) and put matching information on either side. For instance, borrowing the subject from the previous example, you could put “red fox” on one side, and “vulpes vulpes” on the other. You could then look at one side of the card and try to recall the information on the other side. This method is very similar to the list, but easier to quiz oneself with. It does, however, require more preparation (in creating the cards).
      • Acronyms/acrostics: Acronyms are valuable study methods in memorizing information as well. An example of a useful acronym would be the construction HOMES. Each of the letters in HOMES begins the name of one of the Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, etc.) By remembering HOMES, it becomes easier to list all five lakes. An acrostic is similar to an acronym, but instead of creating a word one can create a sentence in which the first letters of all the words correspond with the first letters of the objects of memorization. For example, in the sentence “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally” the first letters correspond to “parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction,” which is the order of operations in solving mathematic equations. Acronyms and acrostics will do little to help you unless you are already familiar with the terms you are attempting to recall.
   2. Focus on the areas that need the most attention. Many students feel that any time studying counts as real studying, but studying is less effective if you do not target the areas that need study. A student who receives A’s in his chemistry course may enjoy studying chemistry (and can still benefit from it, of course!) but if he is receiving C’s or D’s in math or English, then it is more pressing during the grading period to study those other subjects. Assess your strengths and weaknesses and distribute your time accordingly.
   3. Work with others. While distractions are bad in a study environment, studying in a group or pair can be very useful, as long as everyone involved is focused on studying. Study groups allow the student to use other students as a resource. This is especially useful when the teacher with the necessary information is not available. By working together, students can fill in the gaps for each other and identify with each other’s problems in the learning process, a connection more difficult to make between teacher (who has understood the material for a long time) and student (who is just now being exposed to it). Study groups can also quiz each other, using flash cards or just verbal questions. It is also widely known that teaching someone else material that you are currently going over in class can help you to learn the material more concretely and smooth out the wrinkles in your understanding. If your knowledge of a subject is fairly good but could use improvement, consider tutoring or trying to teach someone else, so that you can cement your understanding or work through roadblocks together.
   4. Develop crucial essay writing skills through practice. A commonly overlooked aspect of study is the student’s ability to discuss a topic in depth, or to organize his thoughts in an essay. Essay writing is not something that can be learned overnight–the only way to develop it is to practice and receive criticism. Take advantage of study periods to write out the information that you know in essay form. This practice can help you to prepare for essay questions on a test or quiz and show you what you know and what you need to learn.

    

   Developing effective study skills in middle school is a wise mode of preparation for high school and for the real world. As you move on through life, the study skills you’ve developed in middle school will be useful to you. Using your techniques, you can commit to memory important information that might someday impress your boss. You can receive and enact instructions given by a superior to the tee, thanks to a cultivated ability to pay attention during lectures and gather information as it is given. Use the time you have now, in middle school, to earn yourself great grades and to develop useful learning skills for the future.

Source: http://www.howtodothings.com/education/a2964-how-to-improve-study-skills-in-middle-school.html

What can you do to help your child study

“Be sure to study for the test on Friday,” one of your child’s teachers is certain to say some day soon.

Does your child know how?

While many teachers spend some class time teaching study skills, students often need more guidance than they get in the classroom. In middle school, there’s more homework, it becomes more difficult and it requires analytical skills your child may not have developed yet.

The study skills your child needs to do well on her test on Friday are the same ones she will need to succeed in high school and college: getting organized, taking good notes and studying effectively.

As your child moves toward independence, she’s less likely to ask for your advice. She will need to go through some trial and error to come up with the strategies most compatible with her learning style. And you’ll want to encourage her to take responsibility for her own school work. You can help her by monitoring homework, asking questions and helping her evaluate what works for her — and what doesn’t.

Helping your child get organized

Getting organized is crucial for your child, says Linda Winburn, a veteran South Carolina middle school teacher who became the state’s 2005 Teacher of the Year. “And the key is parent involvement.”

Some tips to help your child get organized:

Provide a place to study.

It doesn’t have to be a desk, says Winburn. “A kitchen counter is a great place, especially if mom’s in the kitchen cooking.”

The desk or table surface should be big enough so that your student can spread out papers and books. Make sure essential supplies such as pens, paper and calculator are close by. Have good lighting and a sturdy chair that’s the right height available.

Help your child develop a system to keep track of important papers.

If your child tends to forget to turn in homework or can’t quite keep track of how he’s doing in a class, it might help to get him a binder with a folder in the front for completed work ready to be turned in and a folder in the back for papers returned by the teacher.

“For me, staying organized meant creating a system — any system — and sticking to it,” says Gabriela Kipnis, now a student at the University of Pennsylvania. “I had fun color-coding, organizing and using dividers, but the truth is, all that mattered was that there was a method that I stuck with.”

Make sure your child has — and uses — a planner to keep track of assignments.

Help your child get in the habit of writing down each daily assignment in each subject and checking it off when it’s complete. Some schools provide these to students, and if not, you might want to work with your PTA or parent organization to provide planners at your school.

Encourage your child to estimate how long each assignment will take.

He can then plan a realistic schedule, building in study breaks after subjects that are most challenging, and allowing for soccer games and band practice. Helping your child keep track of time spent studying — rather than staring at a blank page — will help him think about how he’s using his time. If he’s spending too much time on a subject that might be a signal that he needs extra help or tutoring.

Help your child break big projects into smaller ones.

A big research project will seem less overwhelming and will be less likely to be left until the last minute if it’s done in manageable chunks, each with its own deadline.

Communicate with your child’s teachers.

If your child is struggling with organizational skills, talk to the school counselor or teachers about what might be causing the problems and brainstorm approaches to solve them.

Sleep’s memory role discovered

The mechanism by which a good night’s sleep improves learning and memory has been discovered by scientists.

The team in China and the US used advanced microscopy to witness new connections between brain cells – synapses – forming during sleep.

Their study, published in the journal Science, showed even intense training could not make up for lost sleep.

Experts said it was an elegant and significant study, which uncovered the mechanisms of memory.

It is well known that sleep plays an important role in memory and learning. But what actually happens inside the brain has been a source of considerable debate.

Researchers at New York University School of Medicine and Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School trained mice in a new skill – walking on top of a rotating rod.

They then looked inside the living brain with a microscope to see what happened when the animals were either sleeping or sleep deprived.

Their study showed that sleeping mice formed significantly more new connections between neurons – they were learning more.

A connection between two brain cells

And by disrupting specific phases of sleep, the research group showed deep or slow-wave sleep was necessary for memory formation.

During this stage, the brain was “replaying” the activity from earlier in the day.

Prof Wen-Biao Gan, from New York University, told the BBC: “Finding out sleep promotes new connections between neurons is new, nobody knew this before.

“We thought sleep helped, but it could have been other causes, and we show it really helps to make connections and that in sleep the brain is not quiet, it is replaying what happened during the day and it seems quite important for making the connections.”

Analysis

This is just the latest piece of science to highlight the importance of sleep.

A new reason for sleep was discovered last year when experiments showed the brain used sleep to wash away waste toxins built up during a hard day’s thinking.

However, there are concerns that people are not getting enough sleep.

As part of the BBC’s Day of the Body Clock, Prof Russell Foster argued that society had become “supremely arrogant” in ignoring the importance of sleep, leading to “serious health problems”.

These include:

• cancer
• heart disease
• type-2 diabetes
• infections
• obesity

The reward for more sleep, Prof Foster argues, is we would all be “better human beings.”

BBC Body Clock: What makes you tick

BBC Science: Sleep

Further tests showed how significant sleep was.

Mice doing up to an hour’s training followed by sleep were compared with mice training intensively for three hours but then sleep deprived.

The difference was still stark, with the sleepers performing better and the brain forming more new connections.

Prof Gan added: “One of the implications is for kids studying, if you want to remember something for long periods you need these connections.

“So it is probably better to study and have good sleep rather than keep studying.”

Commenting on the findings, Dr Raphaelle Winsky-Sommerer, from the University of Surrey, told the BBC: “This is very impressive, carefully crafted and using a combination of exquisite techniques to identify the underlying mechanisms of memory.

“They provide the cellular mechanism of how sleep contributes to dealing with experiences during the day.

“Basically it tells you sleep promotes new synaptic connections, so preserve your sleep.”

 

 Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-27695144