Use Psychology to Your Advantage While Studying

Carter Henken

(All psychology info sourced from Mrs. Kraczek (Mrs. Fram) & her psychology class)

Studying can be tedious, especially if you are short on time and still looking to achieve meaningful results. In order to utilize your time effectively and properly store information in your brain, you need to understand how information is encoded into our brains for retrieval through the science of psychology, which is heavily interlinked with learning. Developing a greater understanding of psychological concepts can assist you in successful learning. 

Psychological research has proven that your brain works to encode (store) and retrieve (pull out) information in order for you to form coherent thoughts and remember past events. The encoding/retrieval process can be explained by two models, the multi-store model and the working memory model. The multi-store model is the process by which the brain encodes or stores information into our short term memory, and the working memory model aims to manipulate the information received by the multi-store model in order to encode the information to your long term memory. Essentially, your working memory acts as a mediator between your short term memory and your long term memory, taking thoughts from your long term memory and stashing them in your short term memory so you can remember them more easily in the future.

There are three primary levels of encoding; structural, phonemic, and semantic. Structural encoding is the most shallow of the three. During structural encoding, your brain focuses on the stimulus material you are attempting to encode and how it is spelled. The next level of encoding, phonemic, aims to help you remember the stimulus by how it sounds. The deepest level of encoding, semantic, works to associate the stimulus with something you know or something personal, attaching meaning to the stimulus so you can retrieve the information easily.

How can this knowledge on the way we store information help us to improve our study habits? Well, It is a known psychological phenomenon that the longer time you spend reviewing material, the more familiar you become with it. Officially known as Long Term Potentiation (LTP), LTP is the basis for most studying that students participate in. While LTP works if you repeat the material enough, you should consider using another encoding strategy like mnemonic devices instead.

Mnemonic devices are a type of encoding technique that breaks down the stimuli and associates it with specific items (e.g. letters, images, rhymes) in order to retrieve information. One of the most famous mnemonic devices is the phrase “never eat soggy waffles,” which many use to remember their cardinal directions because it is an acronym for North, East, South, and West. Another famous mnemonic device is SOH  CAH  TOA, used in geometry to remember the law of sine, cosine, and tangent. Mnemonic devices work because they break down the stimulus into a smaller group instead of maintaining the full stimulus, similar to the process of semantic encoding.

Mnemonic devices come in many different forms; an example of a mnemonic device utilized for encoding is chunking. Chunking is the process of grouping similar words or stimuli to associate them together, like dividing a ten digit phone number into the 3-3-4 format (xxx-xxx-xxxx). By dividing the stimuli into separate groups, it can make it easier to retrieve the information. Encoding using hierarchies is very similar; the stimuli are shifted into related groups in order to associate multiple sets of information.

Another psychological concept to take into account when studying is the spacing effect. The spacing effect explains how the study strategy of cramming (otherwise known as massed practice) is less effective than the practice of spacing your study sessions. By spacing out your sessions, you give your brain time to consolidate the information rather than trying to jam everything in your head at once. Psychologists have proven that a majority of memory consolidation occurs while you sleep. Therefore, if you want to remember anything you studied, prioritize getting a good nights rest so your brain can actually store the information you just reviewed.

Lastly, another tip for encoding information is to use the serial position effect, which states that you are more likely to remember information from the start and end of a list. For example, many U.S. citizens remember who the most and least recent presidents were, but fewer remember the presidents toward the middle of the list. Therefore, to remember information in a list, you should prioritize the most important information by putting it at the beginning and the end.

By utilizing some of these basic psychological concepts like chunking, spacing, and the serial position effect, studying can become less of a chore. Using tools like mnemonic devices to aid your memory by association can drastically improve your study habits and discipline. Even in daily life, these simple tips can help you save precious time by improving your ability to retrieve information.