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

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.

you can connect the separate passages to existing knowledge (that’s why experts are much less prone to interference when acquiring new information). However,

the fact that it is easier to derive the keyword from the target word (go from górod ), than to derive the target word from the keyword (górod from go).

All this would seem to be clear evidence that a single integrated mnemonic should be used for related information. However it should be noted that a previous study4 by these researchers found that separate mnemonics were as effective as an integrated mnemonic when students were asked to learn four 5-sentence biographies. It may be that separate mne

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

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

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.

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

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