My favourite memory techniques for studying and exam preparation
Simple study techniques to help recall facts, lists, processes and more
There aren’t any, what you might call, ‘short-cuts’ when it comes to studying, but there are certainly study techniques your teen can put to use that they might find MASSIVELY beneficial.
Today I want to give your teen some easy and practical study techniques to help them remember and recall as much as possible of what they have studied.
Flash cards
There is a time cost to making flash cards, but I think they can be a really effective method for helping your teen to remember concepts and facts that they find more difficult to recall. Well worth the time investment, and they don’t need to be a work of art.
I found them to be particularly effective when someone else (perhaps a helpful family member) read out the question to me. There’s something about the dynamic of talking about the content of your flash cards out loud with someone that will make your memory retention and recall even better.
Highlighters
Not exactly the most mind-blowing study revelation, but highlighters are geting a mention because they are so simple yet so effective.
Using highlighters to highlight text, particularly in my study notes, became one of my favourite memory hacks for helping to remember important things, whether it was a name, a concept, part of a process — anything I needed to remember specifically.
Using highlighter pens achieves two things:
The physical action of highlighting text should help cement that text in your teen’s mind; AND
The bright color of the highlighted text or image should act like a pin in your teen’s mind — sticking that text or image firmly in their memory so it can’t ‘fall down’.
This second benefit should be particularly helpful if your teen is a Visual Learner.
Discussing your study notes
Using our study notes, I got huge benefit from sitting down with a friend for a couple of hours the day or two before an exam and talking over the main concepts we thought were most likely to come up in the exam.
We discovered quickly what we understood well and what we needed to brush up on before the exam. This seemed to help with our understanding of what we had studied AND our memory recall in the exam.
Whether your teen is explaining or listening, doing both will help to anchor what they discuss in their memory.
And so when your teen is in the actual exam, the idea is that they should be able to cast their mind back to the discussions they had (with you or a friend), and remember the concepts talked about.
Mnemonic devices
What kind of memory hack list would this be if I didn’t mention mnemonic devices?!
For the uninitiated, mnemonic devices are techniques that help you to remember something.
You might be familiar with ‘word mnemonics’, which are often used by teachers to help students remember concepts, but any type of technique that aids memory is a mnemonic device.
At primary school I learnt the order of the planets in distance from the Sun using a word mnemonic: Many Very Energetic Mice Jumped Straight Up Neptune’s Pants (Pluto was considered to be a planet back then…). Almost 30 years later and to this day I still use this mnemonic!
Mnemonic devices are really useful for helping to remember concepts that involve order, lists, or a process — things that have consecutive parts. Things like:
The order of the elements in the Periodic Table
The steps involved in cell division
The process for expanding an algebraic equation (FOIL: first, outer, inner, last)
There are no limits to what your teen could apply a mnemonic device to.
For more examples and to get a better idea of how mnemonic devices could help your teen’s memory recall, I came across this delightful overview of mnemonic devices, prepared by Dennis Congos, University of Central Florida.
I would be interested to hear in the comments if your teen has any mnemonic devices that they find beneficial?!
Thanks for reading and best of luck to your teen with their study.
Clare