The SECRET to Remembering More in EXAMS | Effective Revision Techniques

so let's imagine you've got your exams coming up in the next weeks or months it's time for everyone's favorite part of revision creating a sparkly new revision timetable so you've decided Monday is going to be devoted to psychology starting with paper one so social influence first Tuesday will be Memory Wednesday attachment Thursday Psychopathology Friday you've decided you'll start paper two with the approaches Saturday bioc pychology Sunday have a rest and then Monday crack on with research methods sounds good right however as good and as color coordinated as this plan might be it's missing a psychological trick that can take the effectiveness of your revision to a whole other level hey everyone welcome back to Bear it in mind so what's wrong with this revision timetable it reflects what some psychologists call Mast practice which is okay it's not terrible it's just that there is something even better something called space repetition most people know that if you're trying to learn something simply studying it once won't do the trick it won't stay in your memory for the long term so we study it again but what fewer people know is that the timing of when you practice matters a great deal Mast practice is when you repeatedly study the same information in one study session in contrast spaced repetition is when you repeatedly study the same information but it is spaced out over time there are intervals or time gaps between each study session but does space repetition actually work what's the psychological evidence behind it consider this study from 2011 to see the impact space repetition can make on your own learning four groups of students were presented with some word pairs to learn and they were shown a Swahili word with its English translation below it and were told to study the pair so that they could remember the English word when given the Swahili word group one studied the words once and then were tested this was how much they remembered no surprise is here that they didn't do particularly well given there was a lack of active recall group two were given the word pairs to study and then they had to recall the word list and them were tested here's how they did notably better further evidence for the importance of active recall in your revision but now here's where things got interesting group three did must practice this was where they St the words but when they recalled the word pairs they recalled one word pair multiple times before moving on to the next word pair there was no spacing between testing themselves and here's how they did when tested interestingly not much difference but group four is where we see the lesson for this video in contrast to group three who had no spacing between testing themselves in group four they studied the word pairs and then recalled them but rather than repeating their recall of the word pair again and again they spaced out their repetition of recall there was some time some space between when they recalled the first time and when they recalled again this is how they did now just pause for a moment and really grasp what this study is showing you group three and group four did exactly the same amount of work studied for exactly the same amount of time but got incredibly different scores on the results no more effort No More Time study being but an almost 50% Improvement in performance why because they spaced out their recall they tested themselves multiple times but spaced it out rather than doing it all in one go the evidence is so strong that one review stated that the benefits of space practice to learning are arguably one of the strongest contributions that cognitive psychology has made to education so why does space repetition work well this brings us to the for hting curve proposed by German psychologist Hans ebbinghouse which shows the way that learned information Fades over time when we first learn something our memory can be quite strong depending on how we studied and learned the material especially if we do active recall but over time the strength of that memory Fades ebbing House's important Discovery was that by reviewing new information at Key moments on the forgetting curve you you can reduce the rate at which you forget it for example if you're revising ways of studying the brain and are trying to remember how post-mortems fmis eegs and erps work you've forgotten nearly half the content by the following day and by the time a week's gone by well I don't know sir Petty but we can use our knowledge of the forgetting curve to our advantage what we want to do is interrupt this forgetting by studying the material again through active recall the key is to allow enough time to have passed so that it's become a little harder to remember this is because as we saw in the previous video on active recall the harder we have to work to retrieve the information the more we strengthen the connections in our brain and the easier it becomes in the future to recall it students can sometimes find this scary and want to avoid finding out what they don't know and can take it as a bad sign that they couldn't easily recall previously studied material particularly when they thought they knew that topic really well it can be discouraging but this is exactly what should be happening and is perfectly normal and it's the very fact of it being difficult to recall that strengthens the memory so once you've revised the four ways of studying the brain review your understanding again the next day it doesn't have to take you very long it could be a simple as grabbing a blank piece of paper and writing down as much as you can remember about how each one works and then recall it a few days later and then in a week and so on let's now come back to our original color coordinated revision timetable and make some changes to now make the most of spaced repetition going to do this in two ways firstly by zooming out and looking at it week by week and day by day and then secondly we'll zoom in and explore what space repetition might look like in each study session so firstly zoom out originally the revision timetable looked like this with each topic to be studied placed on an individual day to gain the benefits of space repetition what we could do is study social influence not just on Monday but on Wednesday and Saturday and then schedule to go back to it a week later the following Saturday and the same for memory for attachment we might study that on Tuesday Thursday and Sunday and then schedule to come back to it a week later on the following Sunday and the same for Psychopathology now I think it's important at this point to remind you what you should be doing in the study sessions you've scheduled for each day you're not studying the topic for the first time to try to understand it you're not making mind maps and flashcards and writing out notes this is stuff that you should already have done ahead of time before you start revising understanding the material making flashcards and summaries is what you do to prepare for revision not actually studying effectively what you should be doing in each of these study sessions is active recall pick any of the four active recall strategies I explained in the previous video testing yourself doesn't have to take long at all for example grab another piece of blank paper can you recall the main categories and subcategories for social influence and then can you add another layer with further detail and do all of this without your notes then check to see how much you got right by looking at your notes a textbook or a complete guide for a topic like these ones for bioc pychology and attachment in your next study session you might use flash cards and then the session after that past exam questions so firstly zoom out and space out your study sessions over time making sure you use active recall study techniques in each session secondly though let's zoom in we can also use space repetition within the study sessions themselves if we are studying social influence we can break up our study of that topic into different parts and repeatedly test ourselves on those areas for example social influence can be broken down into three parts Conformity obedience and resistance so what you could do is test yourself on Conformity first then test yourself on obedience but then come back to do a quick bit of active recall on Conformity again before going on to resistance then when you've done resistance you could come back to obedience again and do a quick test to see what you can remember and then do resistance again to finish a really helpful piece of advice at this point is to have some way of tracking your revision of tracking how you do when you test yourself so you can see which areas you know and are stronger at and which areas you know less well and thus need to spend more time on if on Monday you were completely blank in trying to explain the authoritarian personality you might prioritize this in your next revision session on Wednesday and test yourself more often on it I've made a document to help you with this called the revision tracker which is linked in the description this contains a whole list of questions on the topic that you can use to test yourself and then columns on the right to record the date you tested yourself and a space for you to record how well you recalled it red for not at all Amber for somewhat and green for 100% correct now at this point you might be thinking wouldn't it be great if there was some sort of app that could help do this for me well actually there are quizzler and anky are both flashcard apps that make use of space repetition so that you can revisit the topic you need to more often in your study session they present you with a flash card for you to test yourself with and then when it reveals the answer you rate how well you've answered it the algorithm then shapes how often the same flash card is presented to you more often if you got it wrong and less frequently if you got it right personally I would use anky and I've had many students have great success with it but you find what works for you for more resources to help you with your psychology revision check out the links in the description below and for videos on the bioc pychology topic you can click the playlist on the screen now I hope you found this video helpful and we'll see you in the next one

Channel: Bear it in MIND

Views: 1,238

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Id: zh2qjshLqt8

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 08 2024