With exams right around the corner, there's probably a lot of last minute studying going on! It can be difficult to memorize all of those terms and definitions…so here are some helpful tricks that you might want to try!
4. Use All of Your Senses
Different parts of your brain are responsible for different things. For example, when you do some sort of activity, it may be the left side of your brain that registers what's happening while the back corner does the same for smells.
When you try to remember things on a test/exam, what you're trying to do is reactivate these areas. If you only study by saying something out loud or in your head, only one part of your brain has the memory stored. To increase the chances of being able to remember something, it's best if you try to store the memory in different parts of your brain. How do you that? By using all of your senses.
When you read a definition, smell something while you're doing it. Pinch your skin if there's a part of the photosynthesis cycle that you can't remember. Walk around or twerk a little bit if you're trying to memorize something. Whatever you do, get different parts of your body involved so that your memory gets stored all over your brain.
3. Study Before Bed
Okay, this doesn't mean wait until the last second to study. It's a perfectly great idea to review your notes during the day, but the best thing you can do is review your notes one last time before you go to bed. Make it the last thing you do before the lights go out. Why? Again, it's all about the brain.
Studies have shown that sleep is a time that the brain uses to take all of the shit that you encountered during the day and sort it out (i.e. put it in the right "department", discard useless information, etc.). If you review your notes as the last thing in the day, your notes become the first thing on your brain's list to sort out.
Trust me on this one! This is probably the best method on this list for some quick and dirt memorization.
2. Record Yourself
Once again, this one's all about how the brain works. There is a large body of evidence that suggests that the subconscious mind plays a big role in the workings of the brain. You can take advantage of this by recording yourself saying all of your notes out loud. Then, whenever you're feeling kind of bored or are doing something else, put your headphones on and just let the notes play.
You don't even have to pay attention to what is being said! That's the beauty of this one! All you have to do is let the words kind of sink into your subconscious mind so that hopefully, your brain get store it. You could play the audio while playing video games, going for a walk, taking a shit, riding your bike, etc.
Seriously, this is a great method for all of the lazy people out there!
1. The Feynman Method
This is a method of studying that is named after a famous scientist, Richard Feynman. He was kind of genius, so maybe you should pay attention to this one. It takes much longer than the other ones, but in my experience, it really does pay off.
Here's how it goes: Say you're studying biology and you're doing the unit on systems of the body.
Step 1) Don't even open your notes. Just take out a blank piece of paper and a pencil.
Step 2) Now, without referring to your notes, write down everything you know about internal systems. Try to keep it organized though. Break it off into different sections like respiratory system and digestive system. Be as detailed as possible and try to be as descriptive as possible.
Step 3) Make any connections between topics. For example, if there's a certain organ that works in two different systems, then make an arrow connecting them If you're doing physics and you see that there's a certain equation that you could use in multiple situations, then make a connection between all of them.
Step 4) Once you've written everything down, look over it. If it's your first time, there may not be a lot of info written down. That's okay. Now, open up your notes and see where you missed details and read over topics that you didn't describe very well or missed completely.
Step 5) Then, the next day, take out another piece of paper and do the same thing again. This time though, there should be more information written down and in more detail. You can only build up from your first try, right? The point is to keep doing this so that you know how much you need to study and so that you can really so how much you've learnt by comparing all of these sheets of paper. By the end of it, the hope is that you'll have memorized and studied everything you needed!
Good luck on exams! Hopefully some of this helps.
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