Get Organized and Get Smart
Understanding how your brain learns can boost your memory and make it much easier to retain information. Here’s how better organization can help you learn.
Be Selective & Categorize
- what's important? determine what the central ideas or concepts are
- make a list: write these main concepts down
- group like items: group similar ideas into categories that make sense
- make an outline: have main topics with each containing its related subcategories
- use the outline as a study guide to help you focus on the right stuff
Separate the Wheat from the Chaff
Your mind can absorb only so much at a time. Since you can't know everything about everything, be selective and target the most important. When you read over the material, determine what the main, most important ideas are. These are the concepts that you want to organize your more detailed learning around.
Create Meaningful Categories
You can learn more easily and effectively if you can group ideas into some sort into meaningful categories or groups, and a person can only remember five to seven items as a time.
Since tests usually have more than seven questions, the key is to organize the information into categories or blocks that are meaningful to you, and, if possible don’t have more than seven items in any one category.
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