Study Smarts: How to Learn More in Less Time

1. Train Your Brain to Think on Cue

Remembering Tips 43 REMEMBERING TIP 1 Train Your Brain to Think on Cue As we said in our introduction, studying has two parts: learning and remembering. Learning is pinpointing the facts and ideas and understanding them. Remembering is putting them into long-term storage in your head. For high test grades, you need to do both parts. (It also helps to be testwise , and the authors' companion book, Test-Taking Strategies , shows you how.) Remembering happens in two ways-by rote and by association . Rote memory is when you repeat something over and over again. We'll talk more about it in Remembering Tip 13. Associative memory is when you tie two things together in your mind. It's much more reliable than rote, so it's important to use associative memory as much as you can. Remember Pavlov's dogs salivating every time they heard a bell ring? That's associative memory. Just as Pavlov modified the dogs' behavior so that they would drool on cue, you can modify your behavior so that your brain thinks and remembers on cue. But Pavlov's dogs wouldn't have salivated at all unless they had been hungry when they heard the bell ring. You won't begin to remember much unless you want to. For best results, like the dogs, you must work up some enthusiasm. So the first cue is to manufacture some reason for wanting to remember what you're studying, even if it's just anticipating questions about it on the final exam. You'll have the least trouble remembering if you're convinced that the thing is worth remembering, but research shows that it pays to find any significance or usefulness you can. Decide not just to remember, but to remember until at least the end of the semester, and you really will. 44 STUDY SMARTS The second cue makes use of time and place. As nearly as possible, you should attempt to study the same subject at the same time in the same place each day. You'll soon find that when you get to that time and place, you're automatically in the subject groove. Train your brain to think French in study cubbie B of the library at 7:00 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and it will no longer take you twenty minutes to get in the mood for studying French. You'll save time and you'll also remember more of what you're studying. For best results, review for tests during that regular time slot you've chosen, too. The review will really go quicker, and you'll retain more. There's one more way you can use association to train your brain to think on cue. When you begin your studying or homework, don't plunge right in on the new work. Spend the first two minutes thinking about what you learned last time, and about how that fits into the course outline. (We hope you made an outline before your first class. See Learning Tip I if you didn't.) Two minutes of pre-thinking will activate all the right nerve endings for associating what you're about to study. To make association payoff, you'll need a study timetable that you'll stick to. Most books on studying give detailed instructions for making a study-time schedule. We're sure that you already know how to make one. It's sticking to it that's hard. Give yourself a break. Be realistic and flexible. Figure out how much time you really want to study, and break that time into logical segments for each course. Teachers would love to see two hours of study for every hour of class time, but in reality some subjects demand more time than others. You can't finalize a schedule until you're several weeks into the semester and have an idea of each course's demands on you. One fact to keep in mind when scheduling is that, for most people, the brain works best during daylight hours. It's been Remembering Tips 45 found that each hour used for study during the day is as good as an hour and a half at night. Don't get trapped into making an ideal schedule that you can't possibly follow. If you've never studied more than sixteen hours a week, don't suddenly try to lock yourself...