Tips For Remembering What You Study

There are numerous factors which impact a person's ability to recall information and they can be quite varied. The most basic of these is practice. Now there is little evidence to prove that with practice a person can recall information better inherently, or whether as they practice, their skills and habits improve resulting in an improved ability to recall information. As such the focus should be on improving study habits and skills resulting in an improvement in an person's ability to recall information.

A common cause for a persons lack of recall ability revolves around their concentration at the time of studying. It is easy to say but is often more difficult in practice. These quick tips could assist with maintaining concentration;


•Have a designated study area.
•Make sure all your equipment is close at hand.
•Have regular short breaks but use it as a rest not a distraction.

A lot of people do not know or understand what their learning style is. Therefor how can a person hope to ensure that their study habits match their learning style. Learning styles fall into four main categories and a persons actual learning style may be a combination of these. The primary learning styles are auditory, visual, kinesthetic and verbal.

For a person to optimize their study and improve the ability to recall they must match their study techniques to their learning style. For example a person with a visual/verbal learning style would benefit from preparing flash cards with definitions and study them reading them out aloud. While it is possible to determine your learning style by using free online analysis, an experienced tutor with expertise in learning styles should be able to provide a more accurate analysis. A tutor can also provide some techniques matched to your personal learning style to improve the effectiveness of your study.

Lastly, people generally fail to commit information to long-term memory. Begin by immediately reviewing the material you have learned. Make sure if there are any area's of uncertainty they are clarified as soon as possible. Trying to remember a story with gaps is much more difficult as it doesn't make sense. Secondly, rewrite the material, put the information in your own words, summarize and eliminate any unnecessary information. Bullet points are great, however they must make sense without having to reference back to the original text. Remember it takes time to commit information to long-term memory so review your study notes after a day, at the end of the week and every couple of weeks afterwards.

Remember that improving a person's ability to recall studied material will improve with practice. While the methods as outlined are a fantastic place to start they are not the only methods available and this article has only touched lightly on these. Private tuition can assist with these techniques and assist a person with managing their study habits to make their study as efficient as possible.