Mnemonics for study (2nd ed.) (Study Skills)

this is so, it may be that the place method is best used on expository texts, the link method on narratives, and the pegword method on static visual descriptions.

building understanding requires time, and in the initial stages there is a lot that needs to be firmly tamped into your brain, before you truly, deeply, understand

But list mnemonics can also help you remember the main points of a text. Even though this information is, presumably, meaningfully connected, when you are still building up your knowledge in the area it may well be that you lack sufficiently deep understanding to rely on that for memory.

How far you extend that depends on how long you need to remember the information for. If you want to remember it permanently, you should review it after two months, and probably again after six months. That’s based on a recent large study6 that explored the optimal gap between study and test: to remember for a week, the optimal gap was one day; for

a similar vein, a study involving 8th-grade students9 demonstrated the effectiveness of this kind of mnemonic for remembering the attributes of minerals. The students were given information about nine different minerals, and their attributes on three dimensions: hard/soft, pale/dark, home use/industrial use. Those in the mnemonic condition were giv

This seems to suggest that it is better to create a single, integrated mnemonics for related information from text, and to create it as a whole once you have gathered all the information.

Similarly, when you’re constructing a multi-item mnemonic, you should give some thought to what the retrieval cue is likely to be. In the study just described, for example, it was assumed the theorists’ names (Binet, Spearman, etc) would be given. The student would then retrieve the keyword from the name, and the keyword would trigger the associate

Tellingly, however, the group that saw all this in a picture performed not only significantly better than the group using their own method, but also significantly better than the group given the keywords and iconic images but not shown the illustration or given any description of it (they were simply told to “form a picture in your mind” drawing al

“famous psychologists who contributed to the measurement of intelligence”. In other words, it is the concept of measurement of intelligence that will be the cue, and it is the link between this concept and its keyword that you’d need to practice (as well, of course, as the image linked to