Organisation is an effective memory improvement technique for several reasons: 1) Organizing material hierarchically or in categories makes the information easier to remember. 2) "Chunking" material into meaningful segments also aids recall, as seen when people remember numbers in chunks. 3) Research shows that participants tend to group associated words together in recall even if they were separated in the original presentation, showing the benefits of organizational strategies.

1. Organisation as a memory
improvement technique.
By Syeda

2. What is organisation?
• Organisation is the act of methodically implementing a system into everyday
tasks. Organising material makes it easy to remember. It has been proven that
when we're learning something we often automatically organise the material
in a way that makes it easier to remember.
• Organizing material hierarchically or in categories and subcategories can be
particularly helpful. The way an outline is organized, for example, usually
helps people to remember the material in it.
• Chunking material into segments is also helpful. People often remember long
strings of numbers, such as social security numbers, by chunking them into
two-, three-, or four-digit segments.

3. Research into the effectiveness of organisation.
For example, Jenkins and Russell (1952) studied the recall of
word lists. The word lists contained words that were highly
associated (e.g. knife and fork). They found that p's tended to the
group associated words together in recall even though they'd
been separated in the original presentation. So if 'knife' and 'fork'
had been separated by other words in the original list, they'd be
recalled together.
• Can you think about the evaluation of this study?

4. Research continued.
• TULVING (1962) repeatedly gave his p's a list of words to learn. He
found that the ORDER of the p's recall became increasingly
CONSISTENT- they were organising and chunking the material to be
learnt into easily remember able groups. EG if the word list contained
cat, daisy, sock, giraffe, shoe, scarf, dog and rose, it's likely that no
matter what order they were presented in, the words would be group
together in categories for recall- animals, clothes and flowers.
• Can this study be generalised to the general population?

5. Research criticising organisation
Deese - participants were presented with lists of associated words for
example: thread, pin, eye, thimble, sewing, sharp. The participants were
then asked to recall the words. Deese found that a non-presented word
such as needle was recalled by a large proportion of participants because
they had organised it into a group with the words that had been
presented.

6. Evaluation of organisation as a memory
improvement strategy.
• Memory