Making it Stick to Memory: An Introduction

Most of us hope the information we learn in school or at work will be useful and important now and in the future. Accordingly, HOW we study and practice what we learn must lead to long-term retention and retrieval. In other words, we need to make it stick and be able to remember information when we need to---not an hour later or when the test is over! Let’s review some ways of practicing to remember more effectively and efficiently than others. To get started, read the scenario below and see if any of it sounds familiar.

Immediately after learning new content, students practiced the skill 25 times in a row during one practice session and then repeated this sequence for the remaining skills in the unit. Later when the exam was looming, students studied all or parts of the content a  night or two before the test. “Studying” consisted of reading over lecture notes and maybe taking notes on their notes, rereading the text, and/or highlighting the text..”

Sound familiar?  Sound effective?  In fact, this overall approach – and the way many of us learned to study - is not particularly effective or efficient especially when it comes to moving information into long-term memory for easy and accurate retrieval at a later time. It may feel like studying, but chances are you have found yourself thinking you were prepared for a test after hours of studying in this manner only to perform much lower than you expected or finding items on a test that you simply were not prepared to answer.

Did you know there are more effective strategies that research shows really work? These include distributing study sessions over time so that you can add more sessions but study for less time, adding skills into practice sessions as they were learned—which means you need to connect it to what you already know, mixing up all the skills or information so that you don’t practice the skills and information in the order it was learned, and making sure the practice tasks require you to retrieve the information with no clues or prompts. The procedures and strategies in this series include:

Distributed Practice: Distributed practice means you need to space out your studying with more frequent (but shorter) practice sessions over time.

Cumulative Practice: Cumulative practice means you need to add skills to previously learned (and related) skills to practice activities.

Interleaved Practice: What the heck does that mean? It’s just a fancy term that means you need to mix up related items when practicing.

Retrieval Practice: Well this may sound obvious but it’s one of the best ways to perform your best on exams. You simply need to practice recalling what you study.

The next four blogs on this topic provide brain tips about these practice procedures that will help you increase the effectiveness of your study efforts with little increase in the amount of study time.  I will be using the general terms “skills” or “content” in this series of blogs rather than more precise terms such as declarative, procedural, and conceptual knowledge, cognitive strategies, etc.  This will make reading the content easier and faster.  The practice/study procedures described in these blogs have been shown to be effective for retaining and recalling a variety of knowledge level content.

Topics on Potential Part 1

Making it Stick with Distributed Practice: Forgetting Helps Remembering 

Topics on Potential Part 2

Making it Stick with Cumulative Practice: Never Leave a Skill Behind

Topics on Potential Part 3

Making it Stick with Interleaved Practice: Retention Requires Attention and the Bored Brain Syndrome

Topics on Potential Part 4

Making it Stick with Retrieval Practice: Studying for Tests by Taking The Test