Jaiganesh Nagarajan - Week 16 - Memory In Stress
With AP season comes long study sessions where half the time we wont remember anything the day after. Our brains can hold so much information yet still manage to forget what we just did. To solve this, there are multiple different study methods that people can use in order to retain the most information before their tests.
Oftentimes stress makes people forget the information they had just learned or makes them make bad decisions. For me, the day before a test I will cram as much as I can and then on the test if there was a question that was difficult I ended up blanking out and forgetting everything. One way to reduce the stress of taking a test is to split up study sessions throughout multiple days so you aren’t trying to relearn everything in one sitting. Trying to answer the easy questions on tests first can also help as it puts you in a mindset where you are confident of getting a good score overall. The environment we surround ourselves in also plays a big role in how stressed we may be.
It is important to take care of other priorities that we may have before we start studying or else we will start worrying about them and not learn as much as we should. At the same time we should find places to study that are different to where we sleep or recreate. Working in the same place often distracts us as everything we do for fun is easy to access and can lead us to long sessions where we end up doing nothing. Changing environments can motivate us to get our work done as people will want to leave as soon as possible.
Hi Jaiganesh! Your blog is very interesting and I happened to write something similar for my blog this week as well! I agree that one should space out the studying rather than just cramming it the day before, because it allows for the actual understanding of concepts. As I learned in psychology class, this is known as deep level processing, where one learns the meaning of words in order to memorize it. Compared to shallow level processing, in which one simply looks at the consonants of words, deep level thinking has been proven to be more successful. In an experiment by Craik and Lockhart, they gave one group a list of words and made them focus on the letters and spelling. They gave another group the same list of words and made them focus on the meaning of the word. When they tested the retention and memory of each group, the latter group was able to memorize the words more effectively, proving that deep level processing should be used more often for studying.
ReplyDeleteHi Jaiganesh, I totally relate to you when you talk about how you would cram your study sessions the night before. I can also agree with how you can reduce stress. When I know I will have a stressful week that will be filled with projects and test, I will plan accordingly. I will plan out which comes first and study for those classes first. Once I get bored of studying, then I will move on a different subject. When I take a test, i'll look over the whole test first. First i'll do all the questions I know the answer too. After that i'll look over what questions I think I know how to do, and finally i'll do the hardest questions.
ReplyDeleteHi Jaiganesh, I totally understand when you talk about how people cram over study sessions the night before, and I can totally relate to it. When I know that I will need to do a lot the week, I plan accordingly, and I strategically prioritize the tasks that I need to do based on the weight in the grade book. Moreover, while taking tests and studying, I like to form mental maps to remember things and that helps with recalling during the test, and I like to review a couple key points right before my tests so I don't forget anything.
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