- Check out these various strategies for memorizing content.
- Try using a strategy to help memorize some school materials.
- Write a reflection on whether or not you think the strategy did, or will, help in future studies.
- Share your reflection.
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kande047
June 13, 2014 at 4:32 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
When attempting to memorize school material,strategies that are most effective for me are acrostics as well as rhyme keys. The acrostic is the most effective one for me because I use it the most frequently. When I took music class I used a combination of rhyme and acrostic together. For instance, when reading music if u look at the lines from the top to bottom it reads EGBDF which stands for every good boy does fine. With fine being the last word it rhymes with lines which makes it easy to know the notes for the lines. When reading the spaces it read FACE which rhymes with space.This allows it easier to remember the notes in between the lines. Another subject I like to use acrostics for is math. I use PEDMAS which stands for please excuse my dear aunt sally.This helps me to always remember Parenthesis comes first, then Exponents second,followed by Multiplication and Division and ending with Addition and Subtraction.
K.Marku
June 13, 2014 at 2:19 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
From all the listed strategies my favorite is acronyms. I am a bio-premed major and I have to deal with a lot of scientific terms. Acronyms help me a lot while studying. Another good method is keyword method. I can fluently speak three languages Albanian, English and Italian. The keyword method has helped me a lot learning these foreign language . While learning italian and english, i would connect the word in the certain language to a word in albanian and so it was easier to remember. I have used these two methods all the time. I decided to try a new method for my biology test and it was successful. The new method was the method of rhyme-keys. I had to remember a lot of muscles and nerves so each muscle/nerve i matched it with a certain word that would be easy to remember and it worked very well for me.
bsett002
June 13, 2014 at 1:34 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I like the use of acronyms and acrostics to help me remember complicated topics the best. Sometimes the easiest ones to remember are the most absurd or inappropriate ones. For example, in high school my biology teacher had us remember Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species by using the acrostic Katelyn, Please Come Over For Great S** (I think you can figure out that last work.) This has always stuck with me because it was a funny and memorable moment in class when she told us that, and Katelyn stood there dumbfounded. I also personally like to break words down to differentiate harder words. Taking lots of biology, chemistry and pre-med classes many words I come across look similar but has vastly different meanings. The ability to break a word apart and find the root words from which it is made has helped me immensely in my studies.
gshine
June 13, 2014 at 1:22 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I have been thrown back into study after several years and can absolutely confirm that acronyms and rhymes are a critical feature of my ability to remember. Additionally the more outrageous, vivid and wild these rhymes are the better. I also utilize visualizaion of something I want to remember like the Dear King Phillip Came Over for Good Soup which represents Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species so I imagine the king coming over the sea to eat soup. I also create chaining where I have a sequence of events and it allows me to follow a thread or at least find the thread to being to recall the item. Possibly the most powerful for me is acronyms and acrostic techniques.
Byron.Barbour
June 13, 2014 at 1:21 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I feel like using these memory techniques is a great way to improve my memory. I wasn’t at first, but I tried a couple of the methods out and they seemed to work fairly well. First off I have terrible short term memory. I tried out the “Method of Loci” on a deck of cards to see how many I could remember. I was able to remember 23 cards and their suits in their respective order. I plan on using this technique in the future for simple things like grocery lists or homework due dates. The second thing I would like to improve with my memory is being able to recall people’s names better. Whether it’s a real life in counter or the protagonist in a book. I always seem to struggle with names. I tried the “Imagine-Name Technique” for a weekend and it seems to be working. I do find it harder to apply in readings, however, because you have to wait for the author to describe or give the character a specific trait that you, the reader, can associate that character’s name with. But in a day to day use it was very practical.
sbrig014
June 13, 2014 at 10:56 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
As someone who has studied several different foreign languages, I have found the keyword method, in various forms, to be helpful. For example, in my first year Japanese class, to help memorize the alphabets, our teacher distributed worksheets that had a picture with each letter that vaguely resembled each letter, along with a short description that included a word with that letter. Although this sounds like a somewhat complicated way of devoting an alphabet to memory, even several years later I can remember several of the examples, since the associations they helped to make were very helpful in the early stages of learning.
More applicable to my current level of learning, similar methods to those described are also recommended techniques for memorizing kanji (Chinese characters). Because many simpler characters originate from pictographs, such as the character for big, which resembles a person with their arms and legs stretched out, associating a picture with the word is quite helpful for simple characters. For more complicated characters, which are often simply combinations of many simpler characters, in this case called “radicals”, trying to create an image of the meanings of the individual radicals can be a helpful tool for memorization. For example, the relatively difficult character for the word “frost” contains three radicals that individually mean “rain”, “tree”, and “eye”. So to remember the character, one could consider that someone does not pay close enough attention with their eyes to a tree in the rain, and the next thing they know is that it is so cold that the tree has frozen. This is obviously a bit of a stretch, but coming up with such a story is often quite helpful when you are, in fact, the person coming up with the story.
jrodr043
June 12, 2014 at 3:36 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Using Acronyms and acrostics help me a lot in memorizing a group or words that I need to study. They are very useful techniques because you can associate the words you are having a difficult time remembering and use another group of words that are easier to remember which can help you recall the more difficult words. I use these techniques most of the time for memorizing groups of people, places, or things. These techniques are also very good for memorizing the order the word need to go in like PEMDAS; parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction.
Rhyme-Keys is not a good technique for me I think. It seems to much of a complicated process to memorize when it’s probably just easier to memorize the words on you own. The Method of Loci I think also wouldn’t help me with studying. I think its process too is more complicated than to actually just memorize the words.
The Image-Name Technique would be a good technique for me because it helps be build close relationships between the word needed to study and my personal interests. This technique is epically good for remembering names. The Keyword Method is also another great method for studying words, especially words that are unfamiliar or foreign. It helps bring a connection to a word by looking for closely sounding or spelled words and then bringing it back to the meaning of it. I use this a lot epically when I took Spanish in high school. Also in English class when we had vocab tests with very difficult and long words.
Chaining is a very a good technique epically if you have an Imaginative mind. It calls for you to create a story with the words you need to study. I like using this technique because I like being creative to make a story related to the words I need to study.
By Juan L Rodriguez
TracieDMcGee
June 11, 2014 at 6:10 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I love the strategies that are listed on that web page. I definitely feel as though the strategy of acronyms will be most helpful to me once I resume my biology/science type course in the fall. Other methods that I think will be of help to me and that I use now are Loci and keyword. During test or just studying in general, I can visualize the classroom and that day of class and actually remember what the teacher said, which is the loci method. But I have noticed this to mess me up because I might confuse myself one what was actually said vs what my mind created. The keyword method is helpful to in my Spanish class because there are many cognates that resemble English and so many that don’t so I have to make up connotations for the Spanish words.