Be Happy – Improve Your Memory (Part 11)

Each and everyday, every man has to appear in some examination to accomplish his dreams. Even the basic needs require your skill to be applied for smooth working. The importance of examination goes up for a student who has to ascertain by appearing in an examination as to what he had actually learnt. How do you learn? This you can do either by practice or by memorizing the relevant details, facts, figures, formulae etc. With a weak memory, how can you do it? Approaching exams put on a lot of mental pressure over all the students if they have not prepared well in time, not carried out the practice sufficiently or memorized the critical matters. Presently, we may concentrate how to remember information for exams.

How To Memorize For The Examination

In earlier posts, some tools have been mentioned for improvement of memory. For memorizing the matters for the examination, out of those tools, we may need some systems specifically, like the Number/Rhyme Technique, the Number/Shape Technique, the Alphabet Technique, the Journey Technique and Concept or Memory Maps.

How to Use the Tools:

A very effective way of structuring information for revision is to draw up a full, color-coded concept or memory map of a subject. This will help you to see the overall structure of the topic and show you the associations between pieces of information. A good concept map can be an effective mnemonic in its own right.

The problem with this is that you can forget the label on a line on a concept map. A more reliable method is to take your concept map, and break it down into a numbered list of important points. You can then use one of the peg techniques to remember the items on the list. Alternatively you can use the journey technique for longer lists.

By associating items on a list with a peg system or journey, you can check that you have retrieved all items held by the mnemonic. Supporting facts can be associated into images or sub-mnemonics. These could be triggered by the pegs for the peg systems, or at landmarks if you use the journey system. Alternatively you can loosely associate this information with the facts coded.

Retrieving all the facts necessary to answer an exam essay question becomes as simple as running through the mnemonic in your mind. As you go, jot down the retrieved facts that are relevant to the question. Once you have written these down, you can apply any other mnemonics you have coded, or note any associated facts and connections that occur to you. This should ensure that you have all possible information available to you, and should help you to produce a good essay plan.

Be Happy - Improve Your Memory.