Effective Study Habits

When trying to navigate the academic life, a lot of frustration and shame can arise. The narrative that memory is something that should be perfect is an old idea that psychology research has discovered is not only impossible, but would be unhelpful. Our memory is not perfect, but all of it's imperfections allow us to do things such as imagine, daydream, be creative, and problem solve (Ditta & Storm, 2018). Our memory can not and should not be perfect, but there are things we can do in order to make studying more efficient to prepare for the next exam! Below are a few different tips for improving studying habits and some tiny experiments in order to switch up your daily script.

Handwritten Notes VS Typed Notes

In a world of technology, typing your notes is becoming increasingly popular, but are you really getting all the information you need? According to recent research, handwriting your notes may have more long term benefits including better grades and easier exams (Flanigan et al., 2024). Why is this the case? Handwriting your notes is a vastly different movement from typing that activates more of your brain. Another benefit of handwriting is that you’re paraphrasing information instead of copying, making it easier for you to remember. Finally, handwriting allows for drawings, graphs, and flowcharts to easily be put into the notes, creating for multimodal input. This makes cueing the information included in the notes easier because “...visual imagery is crucial for autobiographical recall” (Conway et al., 2019, p. 39).

But if you are a student typing your notes, don’t worry! While handwritten notes are beneficial, typing notes can also be just as effective with multimodal input. Typing notes leads to a greater volume of both ideas and information and allows students to quote exactly from the lecture (Flanigan et al., 2024). This, however, is not helpful without reviewing and expanding on the given information. During a study session, students should review their notes, expand on the ideas, and relate new information to known information. Overall, one of the most important study habits for students – regardless of note style – is simply spacing out study sessions and getting quality sleep (van Kesteren & Meeter, 2020).

What DOES NOT work?

Students and learners often rely solely on:

Reading directly from the text.
Highlighting parts that stand out.
Taking notes on the text with little to no paraphrasing.

While this may feel like you are encoding the information, you are not making meaningful connections with the content that is needed to effectively update your schema and allow for long-term remembering.

What DOES work?

Students & learners should try:

Creating a personal narrative related to the content being learned!
Find similarities in the text that align with your personal life and make those connections!
Use generative AI to make an expository text into a narrative text for better understanding!

Transforming the content you want to learn in a structurally familiar fashion aids in the generation of inferences that support reader comprehension and recall. This makes the content personal and tailored to your learning rather than a one size fits all format!

Utilizing Narrative

How to use stories in your studying- keep it creative and constructive

As we go through school, we transition from narrative texts to primarily expository texts which employ different memory structures depending on their purpose or content (Mar et al., 2021). This makes them unfamiliar and unpredictable. Have you ever spent a long period of time re-reading the same piece of text from a school textbook and still felt as though you did not fully understand the concept? This is a common experience when utilizing expository texts and often results in weaker recall regarding the topic.

Expository texts typically do not reflect everyday human experience and rarely contain the necessary language markers that connect ideas and provide cues regarding the organization of content. This makes the content of expository texts difficult to comprehend and recall for learners.

In contrast, we are exposed to stories from the very beginnings of our lives and often before we have the capacity to speak or read. Try to recall a bedtime story read to you as a child or your favorite childhood book. Notice how fast something came to mind and how much detail you can recall from a simple childhood story.

Stories, or narratives, naturally provide a clear and familiar structure that reflect human experience and progress through a chronological order of goal-centered events. In this way, narratives become more memorable for readers given their structural familiarity which aids in the generation of inferences that support reader comprehension and recall.

Further, stories and narratives are often more emotional than expository texts and studies on emotional memory have confirmed that emotional content is better remembered than neutral content. So, the next time you have new information you need to remember, we invite you to utilize narrative structure by creating a story about it and see how well you remember it later!

The Role of Vision

The role vision plays in our sense of selves, and our learning

Contrary to popular belief, vision is our strongest sense! Our understanding and memory of ourselves is rooted in our vision, and if you lose your vision you can end up having a much harder time retrieving those memories (Rubin, 2005). This sense is an essential aspect of our memory as much of what you experience is through sight. Seeing someone who is familiar or a place you haven't been to in a long time can bring about memories you forgot you even had! Vision is not the end-all be-all but it is a vital aspect of our memory process. We can also use this understanding about our vision in order to improve our note taking! By incorporating graphics and images into our notes we can increase the number of "codes" associated with a piece of information which makes it easier to remember when you need to recall it. As put by Rubin, vision and emotional can be incredibly influential in your ability to recall nontraumatic events. So, some easy ways to bedazzle your notes can include: drawing out photos included in a lecture/reading, adding stickers, including flowcharts/arrows, incorporating meaningful colors, adding tables, etc. Making your notes more meaningful and versatile is one easy lifestyle change that can dramatically and positively impact your academic life.

What DOES NOT Work:

Just relying on semantics/words
Only revisiting your notes once
Using meaningless pictures, or ones unrelated to the content

What DOES Work:

Incorporating visuals
Adding meaningful drawings
Creating emphasis around key points
Revisiting notes frequently

By adding meaning to your notes, you make them both easier for you to understand and easier to revisit later! Your notes become fun, engaging, and creative, plus you learn in the process!

Sketchnoting

One final tip we have to offer is the incorporation of sketchnoting into your notes. This can be done in class or outside of it. Sketchnoting involves heavily incorporating meaningful visual imagery into your notes. This can include things such as banners around titles and subheadings, adding stars around important concepts, or even adding little stick figures to generalize concepts. Sketchnoting makes your notes cute and easier to read, below we provide a few examples and there are tons of resources online! We used How To Sketchnote: A Step-By-Step Manual for Teachers and Students by Sylvia Duckworth as a guide to create our sketchnotes.

Need an idea on how to get started? Try sketchnoting yourself! This is an easy tiny experiment you can do in order to get better in tune with your creativity and sketchnoting abilities.

A Tiny Experiment YOU Can Try!

We invite you to put some of our recommendations to the test with these tiny experiments! Who knows, you might just learn more about yourself and how to optimize your own memory!

Multi-modal encoding is just the process of using several types of notes across several different occassions. So when taking notes, making sure you are doing things like handwriting, including pictures/imagery, and incorporating narrative can significantly improve your understanding. You do not have to use all, but using all will make it easier to remember come test time. The most important thing to remember is not to cram. While cramming can feel like the best option at times, spending 15 minutes a day for 5 days can be a lot more efficient than an hour the night before an exam. By spending lots of time with material over several days, you are building your schema (array of info regarding a specific topic). This makes things such as application and problem solving questions much easier. Learning is hard and causes us to push our brains in ways we may not be used to, so be sure to show yourself some grace.

Quin Corey

I am a senior music therapy major. I have changed my memory work as a result of this class by understanding that creativity is linked to cognition, not personality. Coming into this class, I thought we were going to learn a lot more about dreams and how the brain in general works. After taking this class, I now instead have a greater learning in accurate memory processes, how memory is a reconstructive process, and how no one has "good" or "bad" memory. I will share this website with peers who are also interested in work regarding memroy.

Emily Bishop

Hi there! I am a freshman pursuing my undergraduate degree in psychology with a minor in political science.

Taking this class has been a fun and engaging experience. I have been able to improve my note taking which has positively impacted my studying. I have also developed a greater appreciation for my mind and what it can do.

Chloe Knepp

Hello! I am a graduating senior psychology major and sociology minor at Pacific University.

From this class I thought I was giong to learn abuot the basic memory systems and what parts play into memory. Instead, I recieved a well-rounded view of how the theories of memory processing have changed over time as well as ways to optimize my own memory in every day life.

Before doing this project I had found this class to be extrememly useful in my own daily life from studying habits to how I viewed my own memory. After doing this project, I realized how impactful I can be by sharing all of this knowlegde I now have with others that struggle in the same ways I do.

I will definitely share this with others (I already have, sort of) because everyone deserve to know the most current information on such an important aspect of our lives.

My most important take-away was changing the way I view my memory. Rather than being frustrated when I can't remember something, I reflect on how well it was encoded and give my brain some grace.

Nevi Reeser

I am a sophomore psychology major. As a result of this class, I have changed how I approach studying. I now study more spaced out and regularly with multimodal inputs.

Citations

Conway, M. A., Justice, L. V., & D’Argembeau, A. (2019). The Self-Memory System Revisited. In The organization and structure of autobiographical memory. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198784845.003.0003

De Brigard, F., Umanath, S., & Irish, M. (2022). Rethinking the distinction between episodic and semantic memory: Insights from the past, present, and future. Memory & Cognition, 50(3), 459–463. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-022-01299-x

Ditta, A. S., & Storm, B. C. (2018). A consideration of the seven sins of memory in the context of creative cognition. Creativity Research Journal, 30(1040-0419), 402–417. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2018.1530914

Flanigan, A. E., Wheeler, J., Colliot, T., Lu, J., & Kiewra, K. A. (2024). Typed Versus Handwritten Lecture Notes and College Student Achievement: A Meta-Analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 36(3), Article 78. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-024-09914-w

Mar, R. A., Li, J., Nguyen, A. T. P., & Ta, C. P. (2021). Memory and comprehension of narrative versus expository texts: A meta-analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 28(3), 732–749. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-020-01853-1

Rubin, D. C. (2005). A Basic-Systems Approach to Autobiographical Memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science : A Journal of the American Psychological Society, 14(2), 79–83. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00339.x

van Kesteren, M. T. R., & Meeter, M. (2020). How to optimize knowledge construction in the brain. NPJ Science of Learning, 5(1), Article 5. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-020-0064-y

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