How to study effectively

1. How to Learn Effectively: What the
research shows
Valerie Landau
Director of Assessment
Samuel Merritt University
December 2012

2. LIFE STYLE

3. Exercise
• When you exercise the body,
you exercise the brain
• Exercise increases oxygen flow to the
brain reducing brain-bound free
radicals
• Oxygen increase in the brain = uptick
in mental sharpness
• Aerobic exercise more effective than
weight training

4. Exercise
A 7 minute brisk walk can improve test
scores
-provides oxygen to the brain
-reduces stress

5. Sleep

6. Improve your memory by
sleeping on it
• Key memory-enhancing activity occur
during the deepest stages of sleep
• Sleep deprivation = Decrease
• Creativity, problem-solving
• Critical thinking skills are compromised
• Memory consolidation

7. Make time for socializing

8. Friends with benefits
(to learning)
• Relationships stimulate our brains—
interacting with others may be the
best brain exercise
• Friends and fun comes with cognitive
benefits

9. “laughter…seems to help
people think more broadly and
associate more freely.”
– Daniel Goleman notes in his book Emotional
Intelligence

10. Don’t sweet the small stuff and it’s
all small stuff
• Chronic stress destroys brain cells
and damages the hippocampus (the
region of the brain that forms new
memories and the retrieval of old
ones.)

11. IMPROVE MEMORY AND
COMPREHENSION
• Meditate
• Write about anxiety
• Spice up your approach to learning
• Mix things up
• Pace yourself
• Change your study location
• Involve as many sense as possible
• Articulate what you’ve learned

12. Meditate

13. Meditate
• Meditation can improve focus
• Meditation can increase the
thickness of the cerebral cortex and
encourages more connections
between brain

14. Variety is the spice of life
and learning

15. Variety is the spice of life and
learning
Varying the type of material studied in a
single sitting leaves a deeper impression
than concentrating on a single skill
•Musician practice sessions often include
a mix of scales, musical pieces and
rhythmic work.
•Many athletes, too, routinely mix their
workouts with strength, speed and skill
drills. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html?_r=1

16. Mix things up
• Mixed sets of problems vs. same
type of problems.
• Children who studied mixed sets did
twice as well as the others,
outscoring them 38% to 77%
Applied Cognitive Psychology, Doug Rohrer and Kelli Taylor of the University of South
Florida

17. Pace Yourself
Learning opportunities are more effective
when they are spaced apart rather than
massed together
http://web.williams.edu/Psychology/Faculty/Kornell/Publications/Kornell.Castel.Eich.Bjork.2010.pdf
Spacing as the Friend of Both Memory and Induction in
Young and Older Adults
Nate Kornell
Williams College
Alan D. Castel
University of California, Los Angeles
Teal S. Eich
Columbia University
Robert A. Bjork
University of California, Los Angeles

18. Change Your Study Location
1) A change in perspective is
worth 80 IQ points.
Computer Pioneer, Alan Kay

19. Change Your Study Location
• There are subconscious queues that
help boost memory.
• The more places you study
(particularly discussion or reading
out loud the better your recall may
be)

20. Study in an interesting
environment
A classic 1978 experiment college
students who studied a list of 40
vocabulary words
•Windowless and cluttered
vs.
•View on a courtyard
-Those with a view did far better on a test than
students who studied the words twice, in the
windowless room

21. Involve as many senses as
possible
• Articulating knowledge makes a
bigger imprint
• Read out loud what you want to
remember. If you can recite it
rhythmically, even better.
• Relate information to colors, textures,
smells and tastes.
• Re-organize and rewriting information

22. Articulate to Remember
• Talk about it
• Re-write so it makes sense to you
• Draw it
• Say it out loud
• Articulation of ideas and data is proven the best way to
learn

23. Repeat to remember
• The human brain can only hold about seven pieces of
information for less than 30 seconds--a 7-digit phone
number.
• If you want to extend the 30 seconds --you will need to
consistently re-expose yourself to the information.
• Improve your memory by elaborately encoding it during its
initial moments.
• If you need help remembering Mary, it helps to repeat internally
more information about her. “Mary is wearing a blue dress and
my favorite color is blue.” It may seem counterintuitive at first
but study after study shows it improves your memory.
John Media author of Brain Rules

24. Short term vs. Long Term
• Cramming may lead to a better grade on a
given exam.
• “With many students, it’s not like they can’t
remember the material” when they move to a
more advanced class, said Henry L. Roediger
III, a psychologist at Washington University in
St. Louis. “It’s like they’ve never seen it
before.”
Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits
By BENEDICT CAREY
New York Times
Page D1
September 7, 2010.

25. Practice to remember
Engage in active learning
1)Take practice tests
2)Take notes while reading
3)Participate in study groups
4)Re-write your notes
5)Illustrate concepts

26. Mnemonic Devices
Use mnemonic devices to
make memorization easier
Mnemonics (the initial “m” is silent)
are usually random associated links
that help associate information we
want to remember with a visual
image, rhyme, song or word.

27. Mnemonic Devices
Mnemonic device Technique Example
Visual image Associate a visual image with a word or name
to help you remember them better. Positive,
pleasant images that are vivid, colorful, and
three-dimensional will be easier to
remember.
To remember the name Rosa Parks and what
she’s known for, picture a woman sitting on a
park bench surrounded by roses, waiting as
her bus pulls up.
Acrostic (or
sentence)
Make up a sentence in which the first letter
of each word is part of or represents the
initial of what you want to remember.
The sentence “Every good boy does fine” to
memorize the lines of the treble clef,
representing the notes E, G, B, D, and F.
Acronym An acronym is a word that is made up by
taking the first letters of all the key words or
ideas you need to remember and creating a
new word out of them.
The word “HOMES” to remember the names
of the Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan,
Erie, and Superior.
Rhymes and
alliteration
Rhymes, alliteration (a repeating sound
or syllable), and even jokes are a
memorable way to remember more
mundane facts and figures.
The rhyme “Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November” to remember the
months of the year with only 30 days in
them.
Chunking Chunking breaks a long list of numbers or
other types of information into smaller, more
manageable chunks.
Remembering a 10-digit phone number by
breaking it down into three sets of numbers:
555-867-5309 (as opposed to5558675309).

28. Write about your anxiety
• Writing is especially effective for students who
habitually choke under pressure
• Students who write for 10 minutes about their
worries before a test score higher than those who
write about something else or who write nothing
• Before beginning the second test, some students
were asked to write about their emotions, and the
others were told to sit quietly. Students who aired
their anxieties showed an average 5%
improvement on the second test.
• Scores dropped by 12% for those who did not
write about their anxiety
Science January 13, 2011

29. Avoid Multitasking
Stanford psychologist Clifford Nass discovered in his studies of hardcore multi-taskers:
“It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They're terrible at ignoring irrelevant information;
they're terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they're terrible at switching from one task
to another.
And:
The truth is, virtually all multitaskers think they are brilliant at multitasking….You're really lousy at it. And even though
I'm at the university and tell my students this, they say: "Oh, yeah, yeah. But not me! I can handle it. I can manage all these,"
which is, of course, a normal human impulse. So it's actually very scary....”
The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2011/04/how-multi-taski
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95256794ng-ruins-your-brain/237628/
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august24/multitask-research-study-082409.html

30. Confessions of A Students
1) Take notes in class
2) Re-write your notes after class (preferably with 24 hours)
3) As you read, underline and write in the margin
4) Add the notes from the reading to your notes
5) Review your notes
6) Make a list of things you don’t understand
7) Make a plan on how to learn those things and follow that
plan
8) Ask questions to colleagues or teachers
9) Add the new knowledge to your notes
10) The night before a test review your notes
11) Get a good nights SLEEP and eat A HEALTHY MEAL

31. Resources
Popular articles on study skills
• http://www.gearfire.net/10-ways-cram-successfully/
• http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html?_r=1
• http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html?src=me&ref=gen
Research on Practice tests and changing of locations
• http://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/RABjorkPublications.php
• http://www.sciencemag.org/content/319/5865/966.abstract
• http://sites.williams.edu/nk2/files/2011/08/Schwartz.Son_.Kornell.Finn_.201
1.pdf
• http://web.williams.edu/Psychology/Faculty/Kornell/Publications/Kornell.Caste
l.Eich.Bjork.2010.pdf
Spacing as the Friend of Both Memory and Induction in Young and Older
Adults
Books
Brain Rules, by John Medina http://brainrules.net/
Focus: the catalyst for innovation: Guided brainstorming for innovators, by
Websites:
http://www.umich.edu/~bcalab/epic.html