The Importance of Repeatedly Reviewing Your Information Whether you are physically on a college campus or are taking online classes, it is a good idea for you to make a habit out of reviewing your notes and texts. School involves taking in a lot of information at a fairly rapid rate.
Combating Forgetfulness While the basic essentials of attending classes and taking notes are crucial, the fact of the matter is that you naturally forget the majority of what you have learned within a short amount of time. In fact, studies have shown that the average college student will forget much of what they learned even a day after school events. Why is it that students forget so much? It turns out that it is the brain’s way of compacting and sifting through information. As a student, you obviously place a priority on learning the material and remembering it, but your brain might not. Your brain is exposed to many thousands of stimuli every second, and it has a fairly set amount that it can take in, process, and think about. As such, information which is quickly learned once will find itself not being assigned priority within the brain. This is why it is very common for students the world over to buckle down and study or a test only to find that they do not exactly remember the material.
How the Brain Works In most cases, this is not the fault of the individual nor a result of laziness. There are a great many students who make a great amount of effort to put in their best with their schooling who might feel fuzzy about concepts learned in the past. This kind of issue is defiantly part of being human, for better or for worse. For a lot of people, it is simply a matter of not fully understanding the way that the brain works. If you really want the brain to remember something of importance, then it is a good idea to review it almost immediately after class. Going over notes and what has been
read a couple of hours after class will give you much more retention ability as it relates to the material.
Repetition The reason for this marked improvement is a simple one- repetition is what influences the way that the brain stores important things. Simply skimming over the material in the time after class is a highly effective way to trigger the way that the brain will notice repetition. As you do this, your brain will sort the information into longer term memory and will crystalize it for later usage. As such, this is one of the many essential techniques which you can utilize during your college degree in order to get better results out of the experience. There may be a lot to take in, but learning and implementing good habits in school will make the process much easier to deal with. Therefore, it is highly recommended that all students add this simple tip to their arsenal of ways to improve effectiveness and performance while in the school setting.
Photo Credit: Lapolab, Osiatynska