Memory Estimated completion time: 32 minutes. Questions to Consider: How does working memory work, exactly? How do short-term and long-term memory function? What obstacles exist to remembering? When and how should you memorize things? In what situations is it best to memorize, and what do you memorize? What can you do consistently to improve both your short- and long-term memory? Memory is one of those cherished but mysterious elements in life. Everyone has memories, and some people are very good at rapid recall, which is an enviable skill for test takers. We know that we seem to lose the capacity to remember things as we age, and scientists continue to study how we remember some things but not others and what memory means, but we don’t know that much about memory, really. Nelson Cowan is one researcher who is working to explain what we do know about memory. His article “What Are the Differences between Long-Term, Short-Term, and Working Memory?” breaks down the different types of memory and what happens when we recall thoughts and ideas. When we remember something, we actually do quite a lot of thinking. NCBI. “What are the differences between long-term, short-term, and working memory?” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2657600/ We go through three basic steps when we remember ideas or images: we encode, store, and retrieve that information. Encoding is how we first perceive information through our senses, such as when we smell a lovely flower or a putrid trash bin. Both make an impression on our minds through our sense of smell and probably our vision. Our brains encode, or label, this content in short-term memory in case we want to think about it again. If the information is important and we have frequent exposure to it, the brain will store it for us in case we need to use it in the future in our aptly named long-term memory. Later, the brain will allow us to recall or retrieve that image, feeling, or information so we can do something with it. This is what we call remembering. Take a few minutes to list ways you create memories on a daily basis. Do you think about how you make memories? Do you do anything that helps you keep track of your memories? Foundations of Memory William Sumrall et al. in the International Journal of Humanities and Social Science explain the foundation of memory by noting: “Memory is a term applied to numerous biological devices by which living organisms acquire, retain, and make use of skills and knowledge. It is present in all forms of higher order animals. The most evolutionary forms of memory have taken place in human beings. Despite much research and exploration, a complete understanding of human memory does not exist.” Sumrall, William, et. al. “A Review of Memory Theory.” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 2016. Vol. 6. No. 5. Working Memory Working memory is a type of short-term memory, but we use it when we are actively performing a task. For example, nursing student Marilyn needs to use her knowledge of chemical reactions to suggest appropriate prescriptions in various medical case studies. She does not have to recall every single fact she learned in years of chemistry classes, but she does need to have a working memory of certain chemicals and how they work with others. To ensure she can make these connections, Marilyn will have to review and study the relevant chemical details for the types of drug interactions she will recommend in the case studies. In working memory, you have access to whatever information you have stored in your memory that helps you complete the task you are performing. For instance, when you begin to study an assignment, you certainly need to read the directions, but you must also remember that in class your professor reduced the number of problem sets the written instructions indicated you needed to finish. This was an oral addition to the written assignment. The change to the instructions is what you bring up in working memory when you complete the assignment. Short-Term Memory Short-term memory is a very handy thing. It helps us remember where we set our keys or where we left off on a project the day before. Think about all the aids we employ to help us with short-term memory: you may hang your keys in a particular place each evening so you know exactly where they are supposed to be. When you go grocery shopping, do you ever choose a product because you recall an advertising jingle? You see the box of cereal and you remember the song on the TV commercial. If that memory causes you to buy that product, the advertising worked. We help our memory along all the time, which is perfectly fine. In fact, we can modify these everyday examples of memory assistance for purposes of studying and test taking. The key is a deliberate use of strategies that are not so elaborate that they are too difficult to remember in our short-term memory. Consider this list of items. Look at the list for no more than 30 seconds. Then, cover up the list and use the spaces below to complete an activity. Baseball Picture frame Tissue Paper clip Bread Pair of dice Fingernail polish Spoon Marble Leaf Doll Scissors Cup Jar of sand Deck of cards Ring Blanket Ice Marker String Without looking at the list, write down as many items as you can remember. Now, look back at your list and make sure that you give yourself credit for any that you got right. Any items that you misremembered, meaning they were not in the original list, you won’t count in your total. TOTAL ITEMS REMEMBERED _______________________. There were 20 total items. Did you remember between 5 and 9 items? If you did, then you have a typical short-term memory and you just participated in an experiment, of sorts, to prove it. Harvard psychology professor George A. Miller in 1956 claimed humans can recall about five to nine bits of information in our short-term memory at any given time. Other research has come after this claim, but this concept is a popular one. Miller’s article is entitled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” and is easily accessible online if you’re interested in learning more about this seminar report. Miller, George A. “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our capacity for Processing Information.” Psychological Review, 1956. Considering the vast amount of knowledge available to us, five to nine bits isn’t very much to work with. To combat this limitation, we clump information together, making connections to help us stretch our capacity to remember. Many factors play into how much we can remember and how we do it, including the subject matter, how familiar we are with the ideas, and how interested we are in the topic, but we certainly cannot remember absolutely everything, for a test or any other task we face. As such, we have to use effective strategies, like those we cover later in this chapter, to get the most out of our memories. Now, let’s revisit the items above. Go back to them and see if you can organize them in a way that you would have about five groups of items. See below for an example of how to group them. Row 1: Items found in a kitchen Row 2: Items that a child would play with Row 3: Items of nature Row 4: Items in a desk drawer/school supplies Row 5: Items found in a bedroom Cup Spoon Ice Bread Baseball Marble Pair of dice Doll Deck of cards Jar of sand Leaf Marker String Scissors Paper clip Ring Picture frame Fingernail polish Tissue Blanket Now that you have grouped items into categories, also known as chunking, you can work on remembering the categories and the items that fit into those categories, which will result in remembering more items. Check it out below by covering up the list of items again and writing down what you can remember. Now, look back at your list and make sure that you give yourself credit for any that you got right. Any items that you misremembered, meaning they were not in the original list, you won’t count in your total. TOTAL ITEMS REMEMBERED _______________________. Did you increase how many items you could remember? Long-Term Memory Long-term memory is exactly what it sounds like. These are things you recall from the past, such as the smell of your elementary school cafeteria or how to pop a wheelie on a bicycle. Our brain keeps a vast array of information, images, and sensory experiences in long-term memory. Whatever it is we are trying to keep in our memories, whether a beautiful song or a list of chemistry vocabulary terms, must first come into our brains in short-term memory. If we want these fleeting ideas to transfer into long-term memory, we have to do some work, such as causing frequent exposure to the information over time (such as studying the terms every day for a period of time or the repetition you performed to memorize multiplication tables or spelling rules) and some relevant manipulation of the information. According to Alison Preston of the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Learning and Memory, “A short- term memory’s conversion to a long-term memory requires changes within the brain . . . and result[s] in changes to neurons (nerve cells) or sets of neurons. . . . For example, new synapses—the connections between neurons through which they exchange information—can form to allow for communication between new networks of neurons. Alternatively, existing synapses can be strengthened to allow for increased sensitivity in the communication between two neurons.” Preston, Alison. “Ask the Experts: How do short-term memories become long-term memories?” Scientific American, Dec. 2017. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-short-term-memories-become-l/ When you work to convert your thoughts into memories, you are literally changing your mind. Much of this brain work begins in the part of the brain called the hippocampus . Preston continues, “Initially, the hippocampus works in concert with sensory-processing regions distributed in the neocortex (the outermost layer of the brain) to form the new memories. Within the neocortex, representations of the elements that constitute an event in our life are distributed across multiple brain regions according to their content. . . .When a memory is first formed, the hippocampus rapidly combines this distributed information into a single memory, thus acting as an index of representations in the sensory-processing regions. As time passes, cellular and molecular changes allow for the strengthening of direct connections among the neocortical regions, enabling access to the memory independent of the hippocampus.” We learn the lyrics of a favorite song by singing and/or playing the song over and over. That alone may not be enough to get that song into the coveted long-term memory area of our brain, but if we have an emotional connection to the song, such as a painful breakup or a life-changing event that occurred while we were listening to the song, this may help. Think of ways to make your study session memorable and create connections with the information you need to study. That way, you have a better chance of keeping your study material in your memory so you can access it whenever you need it. What are some ways you convert short-term memories into long-term memories? Do your memorization strategies differ for specific courses (e.g., how you remember for math or history)? Obstacles to Remembering If remembering things for exams or for learning new disciplines were easy, no one would have problems with it, but students face several significant obstacles to remembering, including a persistent lack of sleep and an unrealistic reliance on cramming. Life is busy and stressful, so you have to keep practicing strategies to help you study and remember successfully, but you also must be mindful of obstacles to remembering. Lack of Sleep Sleep and college don’t always go well together. You have so much to do! All that reading, all those papers, all those extra hours in the science lab or tutoring center or library! And then we have the social and emotional aspects of going to school, which may not be the most critical aspect of your life as you pursue more education but are a significant part of who you are. When you consider everything you need to attend to in college, you probably won’t be surprised that sleep is often the first thing we give up as we search for more time to accomplish everything we’re trying to do. That seems reasonable—just wake up an hour earlier or stay up a little later. But you may want to reconsider picking away at your precious sleep time. Sleep benefits all of your bodily functions, and your brain needs sleep time to dream and rest through the night. You probably can recall times when you had to do something without adequate sleep. We say things like “I just can’t wake up” and “I’m walking around half asleep.” In fact, you may actually be doing just that. Lack of sleep impairs judgment, focus, and our overall mood. Do you know anyone who is always grumpy in the morning? A fascinating medical study from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) claims that sleep deprivation is as dangerous as being drunk, both in what it does to our bodies and in the harm we may cause to ourselves and others in driving and performing various daily tasks. Nir, Yuval, et. al. “Selective neuronal lapses precede human cognitive lapses following sleep deprivation,” Nature Medicine volume23, pages 1474–1480 (2017). UCLA Health. “Drowsy Driving.” https://www.uclahealth.org/sleepcenter/drowsy-driving If you can’t focus well because you didn’t get enough sleep, then you likely won’t be able to remember whatever it is you need to recall for any sort of studying or test-taking situation. Most exams in a college setting go beyond simple memorization, but you still have a lot to remember for exams. For example, when Saanvi sits down to take an exam on introductory biology, she needs to recall all the subject-specific vocabulary she read in the textbook’s opening chapters, the general connections she made between biological studies and other scientific fields, and any biology details introduced in the unit for which she is taking the exam. Trying to make these mental connections on too little sleep will take a large mental toll because Saanvi has to concentrate even harder than she would with adequate sleep. She isn’t merely tired; her brain is not refreshed and primed to conduct difficult tasks. Although not an exact comparison, think about when you overtax a computer by opening too many programs simultaneously. Sometimes the programs are sluggish or slow to respond, making it difficult to work efficiently; sometimes the computer shuts down completely and you have to reboot the entire system. Your body is a bit like that on too little sleep. On the flip side, though, your brain on adequate sleep is amazing, and sleep can actually assist you in making connections, remembering difficult concepts, and studying for exams. The exact reasons for this is still a serious research project for scientists, but the results all point to a solid connection between sleep and cognitive performance. If you’re interested in learning more about this research, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) is a good place to start. One article is entitled “College Students: Getting Enough Sleep Is Vital to Academic Success.” How long do you sleep every night on average? Do you see a change in your ability to function when you haven’t had enough sleep? What could you do to limit the number of nights with too little sleep? Downside of Cramming At least once in their college careers, most students will experience the well-known pastime called cramming . Consider the following scenario: Shelley has lots of classes, works part-time at a popular restaurant, and is just amazingly busy, so she puts off serious study sessions day after day. She isn’t worried because she has set aside time she would have spent sleeping to cram just before the exam. That’s the idea anyway. Originally, she planned to stay up a little late and study for four hours from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. and still get several hours of refreshing sleep. But it’s Dolphin Week or Beat State Day or whatever else comes up, and her study session doesn’t start until midnight—she’ll pull an all-nighter (to be more precise, this is actually an all-really-early- morning-er, but it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it). So, two hours after her original start time, she tries to cram all the lessons, problems, and information from the last two weeks of lessons into this one session. Shelley falls asleep around 3 a.m. with her notes and books still on her bed. After her late night, she doesn’t sleep well and goes into the morning exam tired. Shelley does okay but not great on the exam, and she is not pleased with her results. More and more research is showing that the stress Shelley has put on her body doing this, combined with the way our brains work, makes cramming a seriously poor choice for learning. One sleep researcher, Dr. Susan Redline from Boston, says, “Sleep deficiency can affect mood and the ability to make memories and learn, but it also affects metabolism, appetite, blood pressure, levels of inflammation in the body and perhaps even the immune response.” Redline, Susan https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Sleep/health-hazards-linked-lack-sleep/story?id=16524313 Your brain simply refuses to cooperate with cramming—it sounds like a good idea, but it doesn’t work. Cramming causes stress, which can lead to paralyzing test anxiety; it erroneously supposes you can remember and understand something fully after only minimal exposure; and it overloads your brain, which, however amazing it is, can only focus on one concept at a time and a limited number of concepts all together for learning and retention. Leading neuroscientist John Medina claims that the brain begins to wander at about 10 minutes, at which point you need a new stimulus to spark interest. That doesn’t mean you can’t focus for longer than 10 minutes; you just have to switch gears a lot to keep your brain engaged. Have you ever heard a speaker drone on about one concept for, say, 30 minutes without somehow changing pace to engage the listeners? It doesn’t take much to re-engage—pausing to ask the listeners questions or moving to a different location in the room will do it—but without these subtle attention markers, listeners start thinking of something else. The same thing happens to you if you try to cram all reading, problem-solving, and note reviewing into one long session; your brain will wander. Determining When/What to Memorize In the realm of learning and studying, some conditions warrant memorization as the most effective way to work with information. For instance, if you are expected to have a working knowledge of conversational French or Spanish, you will have to memorize some words. Simply knowing a long list of terms isn’t going to help you order food in a café or ask for directions in a foreign country because you also need to understand the other language’s grammar and have some sort of context for what needs to be said from your vocabulary list. But you cannot say the words in a different language if you cannot remember your vocabulary. From this scenario, you can assume that memorization is a good fit for some parts of language acquisition. If you approach all your studying as memorization, you will find your course tests difficult at best. Most college courses will ask you to apply, analyze, evaluate, and create with the information you are learning, which is discussed earlier in the chapter. Merely being able to memorize so that you can recognize or recall information will not get you far in your college classes. A worthwhile book on memory, thinking, and learning is a short study called Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel. The authors conclude, after extensive research, that our attempts to speed up learning and make studying easier are not good ideas. Studying is hard work, and it should be. For learning to stick , we need to work hard to pull the information out of our memory and use it by continually pushing ourselves to accomplish increasingly difficult tasks.

College Success


Studying Estimated completion time: 27 minutes. Questions to Consider: How do you prepare yourself and your environment for successful studying? What study strategies will be most beneficial to you? What are learning preferences and strategies and how can you leverage those to your advantage? Preparing to Study Studying is hard work, but you can still learn some techniques to help you be a more effective learner. Two major and interrelated techniques involve avoiding distractions to the best of your ability and creating a study environment that works to help you concentrate. Avoiding Distractions We have always had distractions—video games, television shows, movies, music, friends—even housecleaning can distract us from doing something else we need to do, like study for an exam. That may seem extreme, but sometimes vacuuming is the preferred activity to buckling down and working through calculus problems! Cell phones, tablets, and portable computers that literally bring a world of possibilities to us anywhere have brought distraction to an entirely new level. When was the last time you were with a large group of people when you didn’t see at least a few people on devices? Video games are a common distraction, but we need to be aware that even tedious activities like cleaning can be a distraction from studying. (Credit: Footy.com Images / Flickr Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC-BY 2.0)) When you study, your biggest challenge may be to block out all the competing noise. And letting go of that connection to our friends and the larger world, even for a short amount of time, can be difficult. Perhaps the least stressful way to allow yourself a distraction-free environment is to make the study session a definite amount of time: long enough to get a significant amount of studying accomplished but short enough to hold your attention. You can increase that attention time with practice and focus. Pretend it is a professional appointment or meeting during which you cannot check e-mail or texts or otherwise engage with your portable devices. We have all become very attached to the ability to check in—anonymously on social media or with family and friends via text, chat, and calls. If you set a specific amount of time to study without interruptions, you can convince your wandering mind that you will soon be able to return to your link to the outside world. Start small and set an alarm—a 30-minute period to review notes, then a brief break, then another 45-minute study session to quiz yourself on the material, and so on. When you prepare for your optimal study session, remember to do these things: Put your phone out of sight—in another room or at least some place where you will not see or hear it vibrate or ring. Just flipping it over is not enough. Turn off the television or music (more on that in the next section). Unless you are deliberately working with a study group, study somewhere alone if possible, or at least far enough away from others to not hear them talking. If you live with lots of other people or don’t have access to much privacy, see if you can negotiate some space alone to study. Ask others to leave one part of the house or an area in one room as a quiet zone during certain hours. Ask politely for a specific block of time; most people will respect your educational goals and be willing to accommodate you. If you’re trying to work out quiet zones with small children in the house, the bathtub with a pillow can make a fine study oasis. Study Environment You may not always be in the mood or inspired to study. And if you have a long deadline, maybe you can blow off a study session on occasion, but you shouldn’t get into the habit of ignoring a strong study routine. Jane Austen once wrote in a letter, “I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on till I am.” Sometimes just starting is the hard part; go ahead and begin. Don’t wait around for your study muse; start working, and she’ll show up. Sometimes you just need to plop down and study whenever and wherever you can manage—in the car waiting for someone, on the bus, at the Little League field as you cheer on your shortstop. And that’s okay if this is the exception. For long-term success in studying, though, you need a better study setting that will help you get the most out of your limited study time. Whatever your space limitations, carve out a place that you can dedicate to reading, writing, note-taking, and reviewing. This doesn’t need to be elaborate and expensive—all you truly need is a flat surface large enough to hold either your computer or writing paper, book or notes, pens/pencils/ markers, and subject-specific materials you may need (e.g., stand-alone calculators, drawing tools, and notepads). Your space should be cool or warm enough for you to be comfortable as you study. What do you have now that you consider your study space? Is it set up for your optimal success? Which is before, and which is after? (Credit: Ali West / Flickr / Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC-BY 2.0)) If it is at all possible, try to make this area exclusive to your study sessions and something you can leave set up all the time and a place out of the way of family or roommate traffic. For example, Martina thought setting up her study station on the dining room table was a good idea at first. The view was calming, and the table was big enough to spread out and could even hold all her materials to study architectural drawings, her favorite subject. But then she needed the table for a small family dinner party, so she had to find a cubbyhole to hide away her supplies with some needing to go into a closet in the next room. Now she was spread out over multiple study spaces. And the family TV was in an adjacent room, not visible from the table but certainly an auditory distraction. Martina ultimately decided to forgo her view and create a smaller station in an unused bedroom so she could leave her supplies out and have a quieter area. You may have to try out numerous places to determine what works best for you. In fact, if you have a few comfortable places to study, such as the library, a coffee shop, and your room, you will increase your ability to recall the information you are studying because these different environments will help you encode the information you are studying in multiple ways. The belief that you must study in the same place and in the same way is a myth: Varying your study spaces and your study strategies can help you encode, store, and retrieve the information more effectively. Wherever you study, try to make it a welcoming place you want to be in—not an uncomfortable environment that makes you want to just do the minimum you must complete and leave. You should include the basics: a good chair, a work surface, and whatever materials, books, notes, and other supplies you need for the subject you are studying. You don’t need an elaborate setting, but you may want to consider including a few effective additions if you have the space: small bulletin board for often-used formulas encouraging quotes or pictures of your goal whiteboard for brainstorming sticky notes for reminders in texts and notes file holder for most-used documents bookshelf for reference books Describe every element in your ideal study environment and explain why it’s there as well as how it will make more efficient use of your time, limit distractions, or in some other way strengthen your ability to study. After you have described your ideal study environment, think about how you can adapt that environment if you cannot be in your favorite place to study. How do you make your own space in the library, a student lounge, or a dedicated space on campus for student studying? Debunking Study Myths MYTH #1: You can multitask while studying. How many times do you eat in the car? Watch TV while you write out a grocery list? Listen to music while you cook dinner? What about type an e-mail while you’re on the phone with someone else and jot down notes about the call? The common term for this attempt to do more than one thing at a time is multitasking, and almost everyone does it at some point. On some days, you simply cannot accomplish all that you want to get done, so you double up. The problem is, multitasking doesn’t really work. Of course, it exists, and we do it. For instance, we walk and chew gum or drive and talk, but we are not really thinking about two or more distinct things or doing multiple processes simultaneously. You are far more likely to miss important details, and far less likely to retain information, if you try to multitask when studying. MYTH #2: Highlighting main points of a text is useful on its own. Another myth of studying that seems to have a firm hold is that the idea of highlighting text—in and of itself—is the best way to review study material. It is one way, and you can get some benefit from it, but don’t trick yourself into spending too much time on this surface activity and consider your study session complete. Annotating texts or notes is a first-step type of study practice. If you allow it to take up all your time, you may think you are fully prepared for an exam because you put in the time. Actually, you need much more time reviewing and retrieving your lessons and ideas from the text or class lecture as well as quizzing yourself to accomplish your goal of learning so you can perform well on the exam. Highlighting is a task you can do rather easily, and it makes you feel good because you are actively engaging with your text, but true learning needs more steps. MYTH #3: Studying effectively is effortless. There is nothing effortless, or even pleasant at times, about studying. This is why so many students don’t put in the time necessary to learn complex material: it takes time, effort, and, in some cases, a little drudgery. This is not to say that the outcome, learning—and maybe making an A—is not pleasant and rewarding. It is just that when done right, learning takes focus, deliberate strategies, and time. Think about a superstar athlete who puts in countless hours of drills and conditioning so that she makes her work on the field look easy. If you can also enjoy the studying, the skill development, and the knowledge building, then you will most likely be more motivated to do the work. Study and learning myths persist in many people, even those who have achieved success in college. When are you most liable to multitask? How could you be more aware of this practice and try to eliminate it, especially when it comes to studying? How can you make your initial text highlighting more time efficient so you can include other study practices? Study Strategies Everyone wishes they had a better memory or a stronger way to use memorization. You can make the most of the memory you have by making some conscious decisions about how you study and prepare for exams. Incorporate these ideas into your study sessions: Practicing effective memorization is when you use a trick, technique, or strategy to recall something—for another class, an exam, or even to bring up an acquaintance’s name in a social situation. Really whatever works for you to recall information is a good tool to have. You can create your own quizzes and tests to go over material from class. You can use mnemonics to jog your memory. You can work in groups to develop unique ways to remember complex information. Whatever methods you choose to enhance your memory, keep in mind that repetition is one of the most effective tools in any memory strategy. Do whatever you do over and over for the best results. Using Mnemonics Mnemonics (pronounced new-monics) are a way to remember things using reminders that are linked to the content you are trying to remember. Did you learn the points of the compass by remembering NEWS (north, east, west, and south)? Or the notes on the music staff as FACE or EGBDF (every good boy does fine)? These are mnemonics, specifically acronyms , or words created out of the first letters of the terms you are trying to recall. When you’re first learning something and you aren’t familiar with the foundational concepts, these help you bring up the information quickly, especially for multistep processes or lists. After you’ve worked in that discipline for a while, you likely don’t need the mnemonics, but you probably won’t forget them either. Familiar Mnemonics You May Find Useful There are a variety of mnemonics that work well for college students, but use them with caution as they are good for learning basic information and not complex material. In addition to acronyms, here are a few that college students have used to help them recall. Acrostic sentences. These are sentences formed from the first letter of each item you are trying to remember. They work best for remembering steps in a process. For example, “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally” is an acrostic sentence for the steps in the order of operations when solving an equation. Each word starts with a letter that corresponds to another word in the steps: Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, and Subtraction. Chunking. Grouping items together is another way to improve recall by organizing them by a characteristic they have in common. For example, you may need to remember the countries in Africa and could organize them by relative size, location (north, south, etc.), or letter they begin with. Memory palace. This mnemonic device is more complicated than most because it requires a few steps to create, but many students have found that this strategy works well for them in classes where they must recall a large amount of content. The memory palace, also called a Roman Room or the loci method, requires you to think of a physical space, real or imagined, in which you can “place” items you need to recall within that location. For example, if you are thinking of your own bedroom as the space and you need to remember the parts of speech, you may place “verb” in front of the door to your room as you will need to use an action to open it up. Then, your bed may be where you place “noun” because it is where you add actions such as sleep , read, and daydream . The mirror on your wall may be where you place the term “adjective” because you look into it every day to see what you look like: sad , happy , sleepy . Do you have other mnemonics that help you remember difficult material? What are they? How have they helped you with remembering important things? Practicing Concept Association When you study, you’re going to make connections to other things—that’s a good thing. It shows a highly intelligent ability to make sense of the world when you can associate like and even somewhat unlike components. If, for instance, you were reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and you read the line that he had been in Birmingham, you may remember a trip you took with your family last summer through Alabama and that you passed by and visited the civil rights museum in Birmingham. This may remind you of the different displays you saw and the discussions you had with your family about what had happened concerning civil rights in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s in the United States. This is a good connection to make, but if your assignment is to critique the literary aspects of King’s long epistle, you need to be able to come back to the actual words of the letter and see what trends you can see in his writing and why he may have used his actual words to convey the powerful message. The connection is fine, but you can’t get lost in going down rabbit holes that may or may not be what you’re supposed to be doing at the time. Make a folder for this assignment where you can put things such as a short summary of your trip to Alabama. You may eventually include notes from this summary in your analysis. You may include something from a website that shows you information about that time period. Additionally, you could include items about Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and death and his work for civil rights. All of these elements may help you understand the significance of this one letter, but you need to be cognizant of what you’re doing at the time and remember it is not usually a good idea to just try to keep it all in your head. The best idea is to have a way to access this information easily, either electronically or in hard copy, so that if you are able to use it, you can find it easily and quickly. Generating Idea Clusters Like mnemonics, idea clusters are nothing more than ways to help your brain come up with ways to recall specific information by connecting it to other knowledge you already have. For example, Andrea is an avid knitter and remembers how to create complicated stitches by associating them with nursery rhymes she read as a child. A delicate stitch that requires concentration because it makes the yarn look like part of it is hiding brings to mind Red Riding Hood, and connecting it to that character helps Andrea recall the exact order of steps necessary to execute the design. You can do the same thing with song lyrics, lines from movies, or favorite stories where you draw a connection to the well-known phrase or song and the task you need to complete. Choose one of the following, and create an idea cluster to group and organize: Example A: aviation jobs in North America Example B: the use of analytics in sports to determine team rosters Example C: how social media affects political campaigns Start the idea cluster with the topic circled in the middle of the page. For Example A, you might make one cluster off the main circle for specific positions; you could add another cluster for salary ranges and another for geographic regions. Three Effective Study Strategies There are more than three study strategies, but focusing on the most effective strategies will make an enormous difference in how well you will be able to demonstrate learning (also known as “acing your tests”). Here is a brief overview of each of the three strategies: Spacing—This has to do with when you study. Hint: Don’t cram; study over a period of days, preferably with “breaks” in between. Interleaving—This has to do with what you study. Hint: Don’t study just one type of content, topic, chapter, or unit at a time; instead, mix up the content when you study. Practice testing—This has to do with how you study. Hint: Don’t just reread content. You must quiz or test your ability to retrieve the information from your brain. Spacing We all know that cramming is not an effective study strategy, but do we know why? Research on memory suggests that giving yourself time in between study sessions actually helps you forget the information. And forgetting, which sounds like it would be something you don’t want to do, is actually good for your ability to remember information long-term. That’s because every time you forget something, you need to relearn it, leading to gains in your overall understanding and “storage” of the material. The table below demonstrates how spacing works. Assume you are going to spend about four hours studying for a sociology exam. Cramming would have you spending most of those four hours the night before the exam. With spacing, on the other hand, you would study a little bit each day. Spacing Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Cramming Study for 1 hour Study for 3 hours Sociology Test Spacing Study for 1 hour Study for 30 minutes Study for 1 hour Study for 90 minutes Sociology Test Interleaving One particular studying technique is called interleaving , which calls for students to mix up the content that is being studied. This means not just spending the entire study session on one sort of problem and then moving on to a different sort of problem at a later time. If you take the schedule we used for the spacing example above, we can add the interleaving concepts to it. Notice that interleaving includes revisiting material from a previous chapter or unit or revisiting different types of problems or question sets. The benefit is that your brain is “mixing up” the information, which can sometimes lead to short-term forgetting but can lead to long-term memory and learning. Interleaving Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Read Sociology, Chapters 1 and 3 Reorganize reading notes Practice test for Sociology, Chapters 1 and 3 Take Ch 1 online quiz Create Chapter 2 concept map Take online quizzes for Chapters 2 and 3 Reorganize notes Create practice test Reorganize and create concept maps from notes Review items missed on online quizzes Take practice test and review challenge areas TEST in sociology, Chapters 1-3 Practice Testing You can do a practice “test” in two ways. One is to test yourself as you are reading or taking in information. This is a great way to add a little variety to your studying. You can ask yourself what a paragraph or text section means as you read. To do this, read a passage in a text, cover up the material, and ask yourself, “What was the main idea of this section?” Recite aloud or write down your answer, and then check it against the original information. Another, more involved, way to practice test is to create flashcards or an actual test by writing a test. This takes more time, but there are online programs such as Quizlet that make it a little easier. Practice testing is an effective study strategy because it helps you practice retrieving information, which is what you want to be able to do when you are taking the real test. One of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to someone else, so ask a friend or family member if you can explain something to them, and teach them the lesson. You may find you know more about the subject than you thought or you may realize quickly that you need to do more studying. Why does teaching someone else rank as one of the most effective ways to learn something? It is a form of practice testing that requires you to demonstrate you know something in front of someone else! No one wants to look like they don’t know what they are talking about, even if your audience is another classmate. Recognizing Strengths/Weaknesses of Preferred Study Approaches Most people don’t learn to ride a bicycle by reading a manual; they learn by watching others, listening to instructions, and getting up on the seat and learning to balance—sometimes with training wheels or a proud parent holding on, but ultimately without any other support. They may fall over and feel insecure, but usually, they learn to make the machine go. Most of us employ multiple methods of study all the time. You usually only run into trouble if you stubbornly rely on just one way to learn or study and the material you’re studying or the task you want to accomplish doesn’t lend itself to that preference. You can practice specific strategies to help you learn in your preferred learning approach. Can you think of a time when the way you usually study a situation didn’t work? When deciding on a study approach, consider what you know about the material and the type of knowledge it involves. Is it a group of concepts related to problem-solving methods, such as those you’d find in a physics class? Or is it a literary analysis of a novel? Consider as many elements as possible about the material -- and the way the material will be assessed -- to help choose a study approach. You should also consider your instructor’s preferred method of teaching and learning. Watch the way they teach lessons or convey necessary course information to the class. Do they almost always augment lessons with video clips to provide examples or create a memorable narrative? Do they like to show you how something works by demonstrating and working with their hands—for instance, assembling a piece of equipment by taking it apart and putting it back together again? Echoing their teaching approach may help your studying approach. That doesn’t mean you have to change your entire learning approach to match your instructors’ methods. Many instructors understand that their students will have different ways of learning and try to present information in multiple ways. "Something I wished I knew before going to college is how to properly set aside time dedicated towards studying. If you learn how to manage the material you are studying by breaking it down into manageable chunks, you can avoid last-minute cramming and be put in stressful situations during the test. Procrastination is one of your worst enemies when it comes to studying and proper time management not only can assist you when it comes to ensuring you are properly prepared for a test but also allows you free up your time to relax on weekends, so you are not having to work on school all week long. I have learned that studying effectively is more than just memorizing the material. It is important to actively engage with the material, whether that is in the form of practice problems, creating flashcards, or studying in a group. This allows me to retain the information I am learning so it's not just dumped, and I may use it again in the future. If you are struggling with studying and taking tests, remember that everyone learns differently and what works best for one person may be different for you. Do not be afraid to experiment with different study methods or reaching out to college resources, like tutors. Also, make sure to maintain your mental health by getting plenty of sleep, eating well, and taking plenty of study breaks." —Ethan Meyer , senior Practicing Active Continuous Improvement for All Preferences You can certainly learn through specific approaches or according to specific preferences, but you will also need to adapt to different situations, skills, and subject areas. Don’t limit yourself to thinking you can only learn one way or another. That mindset induces anxiety when you encounter a learning situation that doesn’t match your preference. What if your instructor only uses a spoken lecture to teach concepts in your chemistry class, and you consider yourself a visual learner? Or what if the only method presented to you for learning mathematical computations is to see videos of others working problems, and you’re more hands-on? You may have to concentrate in a different way or devise other strategies to learn, but you can do it. In fact, you should sometimes work on the styles/preferences that you feel are your least favorite; it will actually strengthen your overall ability to learn and retain information. Newton, Phillip M., & Miah, Mahallad. “Evidence-Based Higher Education—Is the Learning Style ‘Myth’ Important?” Frontiers in Psychology 8:444 (2017) DOI: 10. 3389/FPSYG. 2017.00444. Dr. Stephen Covey, famous leadership coach and businessman, called this attention to knowing and honing all your skill sets, not just your favorites, sharpening the saw. He advised that people should be aware of their strengths but should always hone their weaknesses by saying, “We must never become too busy sawing to take time to sharpen the saw.” Covey, Stephen. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People ® https://www.franklincovey.com/the-7-habits.html For instance, in the chemistry lecture example, you may need to take good notes from the spoken lecture and then review those notes as you sketch out any complex ideas or formulas. If the math videos are not enough for you to grasp difficult problems, you may ask for or find your own problems for additional practice covering that particular mathematical concept to solve on your own.

College Success


Test Taking Estimated completion time: 23 minutes. Questions to Consider: What are the differences between test prep and taking the actual test? How can you take a whole person approach to test taking? What can you do on test day to increase your confidence and success? What should you know about test anxiety? Once you are practicing good study habits, you’ll be better prepared for actual test taking. Since studying and test taking are both part of learning, honing your skills in one will help you in the other. Probably the most obvious differences between your preparation for an exam and the actual test itself is your level of urgency and the time constraints. A slight elevation in your stress level can actually be okay for testing—it keeps you focused and on your game when you need to bring up all the information, thinking, and studying to show what you’ve learned. Properly executed, test preparation mixed in with a bit of stress can significantly improve your actual test-taking experience. Preparation vs. Actual Test You can replicate the effective sense of urgency an actual test produces by including timed writing into your study sessions. You don’t need all of your study time to exactly replicate the test, but you would be well served to find out the format of the exam in advance and practice the skills you’ll need to use for the various test components. Consider this scenario: On one early exam in history, Stuart learned the prof was going to include several short-answer essay questions—one for each year of the time period covered. Stuart set up practice times to write for about 15 to 20 minutes on significant events from his notes because he estimated that would be about how much time he could devote out of the hour-long testing session to write one or two required short-answer questions. He would write a prompt from his notes, set a timer, and start writing. If you’re ready and you have practiced and know the material, 20 minutes is adequate to prepare, draft, and revise a short response, but you don’t have a lot of extra time. Likewise, in a math exam, you will need to know what kinds of problems you will have to solve and to what extent you’ll need to show your computational work on the exam. If you are able to incorporate this sort of timed problem-solving into your study time, you’ll be more prepared and confident when you actually come to the exam. Making yourself adhere to a timed session during your study can only help. It puts a sense of urgency on you, and it will help you to find out what types of problems you need to practice more than ones that perhaps you’re more comfortable solving. Leveraging Study Habits for Test Prep In your mind, you probably know what you need to do to be prepared for tests. Occasionally, something may surprise you—emphasis on a concept you considered unimportant or a different presentation of a familiar problem. But those should be exceptions. You can use all of your well-honed study habits to get ready for exams. is a checklist for study and test success for your consideration: Checklist for Academic Success Read this list with each separate class in mind, and check off the items you already do. Give yourself one point for every item you checked. If you always take the success steps—congratulations! They are not a guarantee, but doing the steps mindfully will give you a nice head start. If you do fewer than five of the steps—you have some work to do. But recognition is a good place to start, and you can incorporate these steps starting now. As strange as this may sound, you can find some interesting research articles online about using the taste or smell of peppermint to increase memory, recall, and focus. Read more at: https://naturalsociety.com/mint-scent-improve-brain-cognition-memory . While sucking on a peppermint disk won’t replace studying, why not experiment with this relatively easy idea that seems to be gaining some scientific traction? Whole Person Approach to Testing Just because you are facing a major exam in your engineering class (or math or science or English class) doesn’t mean everything else in your life comes to a stop. Perhaps that’s somewhat annoying, but that’s reality. Allergies still flare up, children still need to eat, and you still need to sleep. You must see your academic life as one segment of who you are—it’s an important segment, but just one aspect of who you are as a whole person. Consider this example: Neela tries to turn off everything else when she has exams coming up in her nursing program, which is pretty often. She ignores her health, puts off her family, tries to reschedule competing work tasks, and focuses all her energy on the pending exam. On the surface, that sounds like a reasonable approach, but if she becomes really sick by ignoring a minor head cold, or if she misses an important school deadline for one of her children, Neela risks making matters worse by attempting to compartmentalize so strictly. Taking care of her own health by eating and sleeping properly; asking for help in other aspects of her busy life, such as attending to the needs of her children; and seeing the big picture of how it all fits together would be a better approach. Pretending otherwise may work sporadically, but it is not sustainable for the long run. A whole person approach to testing takes a lot of organization, scheduling, and attention to detail, but the life- long benefits make the effort worthwhile. Establishing Realistic Expectations for Test Situations Would you expect to make a perfect pastry if you’ve never learned how to bake? Or paint a masterpiece if you’ve never tried to work with paints and brushes? Probably not. But often we expect ourselves to perform at much higher levels of achievement than that for which we’ve actually prepared. If you become very upset and stressed if you make any score lower than the highest, you probably need to reevaluate your own expectations for test situations. Striving to always do your best is an admirable goal. Realistically knowing that your current best may not achieve the highest academic ratings can help you plot your progress. Realistic continuous improvement is a better plan, because people who repeatedly attempt challenges for which they have not adequately prepared and understandably fail (or at least do not achieve the desired highest ranking) often start moving toward the goal in frustration. They simply quit. This doesn’t mean you settle for mediocre grades or refrain from your challenges. It means you become increasingly aware of yourself and your current state and potential future. Know yourself, know your strengths and weaknesses, and be honest with yourself about your expectations. Understanding Accommodations and Responsibilities As with so many parts of life, some people take exams in stride and do just fine. Others may need more time or change of location or format to succeed in test-taking situations. With adequate notice, most faculty will provide students with reasonable accommodations to assist students in succeeding in test situations. If you feel that you would benefit from receiving these sorts of accommodations, first speak with your instructor. You may also need to talk to a student services advisor for specific requirements for accommodations at your institution. If you need accommodations , you are responsible for understanding what your specific needs are and communicating your needs with your instructors. Before exams in class, you may be allowed to have someone else take notes for you, receive your books in audio form, engage an interpreter, or have adaptive devices in the classroom to help you participate. Testing accommodations may allow for additional time on the test, the use of a scribe to record exam answers, the use of a computer instead of handwriting answers, as well as other means to make the test situation successful. Talk to your instructors prior to the day of the test if you have questions about testing accommodations. Part of preparing for a test is understanding the testing environment, which materials will be required, and which will be prohibited. For example, if you are not allowed to have your phone with you during a test, you may need to leave it in a secure place. Any approved accommodations you need should be indicated to the instructor ahead of time. (Credit: Universiti Malaysia Sarawak Malaysia / flickr Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC-BY 2.0)) Prioritizing Time Surrounding Test Situations Keep in mind that you don’t have any more or less time than anyone else, so you can’t make time for an activity. You can only use the time everyone gets wisely and realistically. Exams in college classes are important, but they are not the only significant events you have in your classes. In fact, everything leading up to the exam, the exam itself, and the post-exam activities are all one large continuum. Think of the exam as an event with multiple phases, more like a long-distance run instead of a 50-yard dash. Step back and look at the big picture of this timeline. Draw it out on paper. What needs to happen between now and the exam so you feel comfortable, confident, and ready? If your instructor conducts some sort of pre-exam summary or prep session, make sure to attend. These can be invaluable. If this instructor does not provide that sort of formal exam prep, create your own with a group of classmates or on your own. Consider everything you know about the exam, from written instructions to notes you took in class, including any experiential notes you may have from previous exams, such as the possibility of bonus points for answering an extra question that requires some time management on your part. You can read more about time management in Managing Your Time and Priorities . Which apps can help you study for a test, increase your memory, and even help you overcome test anxiety? Personal Zen is a free online gaming app clinically proven to reduce stress and anxiety. The games retrain your brain to think more positively, reducing stress to help you focus on the experiences around you. Games like solitaire, hangman, and Simon Says all build on your memory, keeping it sharp and active. There are loads of fun, free online memory games you can use to make time wasting a little less wasteful. For more than 250 options, visit the Memory Improvement Tips website. Study Hall might be able to help you dig into a research topic or find additional content to help you if you’re struggling with a course. Their library of free lectures and content is created by expert instructors across a number of course areas. Test Day Once you get to the exam session, try your best to focus on nothing but the exam. This can be very difficult with all the distractions in our lives. But if you have done all the groundwork to attend the classes, completed the assignments, and scheduled your exam prep time, you are ready to focus intently for the comparatively short time most exams last. Arriving to class: Don’t let yourself be sidetracked right at the end. Beyond the preparation we’ve discussed, give yourself some more advantages on the actual test day: Get to the testing location a few minutes early so you can settle into your place and take a few relaxing breaths. Don’t let other classmates interrupt your calmness at this point. Just get to your designated place, take out whatever supplies and materials you are allowed to have, and calm your mind. Taking the test: Once the instructor begins the test: Listen carefully for any last-minute oral directions that may have changed some detail on the exam, such as the timing or the content of the questions. As soon as you receive the exam sheet or packet, make a quick scan over the entire test. Don’t spend a lot of time on this initial glance, but make sure you are familiar with the layout and what you need to do. Using this first review, decide how you will allocate your available time for each section. You can even jot down how many minutes you can allow for the different sections or questions. Then for each section, if the exam is divided this way, be sure you read the section directions very carefully so you don’t miss an important detail. For example, instructors often offer options—so you may have four short-answer questions from which to choose, but you only need to answer two of them. If you had not read the directions for that section, you may have thought you needed to provide answers to all four prompts. Working on extra questions for which you likely will receive no credit would be a waste of your limited exam time. The extra time you spend at the beginning is like an investment in your overall results. Answer every required question on the exam. Even if you don’t complete each one, you may receive some credit for partial answers. Whether or not you can receive partial credit would be an excellent question to ask before the exam during the preparation time. If you are taking an exam that contains multiple-choice questions, go through and answer the questions about which you are the most confident first. Read the entire question carefully even if you think you know what the stem (the introduction of the choices) says, and read all the choices. Skip really difficult questions or ones where your brain goes blank. Then you can go back and concentrate on those skipped ones later after you have answered the majority of the questions confidently. Sometimes a later question will trigger an idea in your mind that will help you answer the skipped questions. And, in a similar fashion to spending a few minutes right at the beginning of the test time to read the directions carefully and identify the test elements, allow yourself a few minutes at the end of the exam session to review your answers. Depending on what sort of exam it is, you can use this time to check your math computations, review an essay for grammatical and content errors, or answer the difficult multiple- choice questions you skipped earlier. Finally, make sure you have completed the entire test: check the backs of pages, and verify that you have a corresponding answer section for every question section on the exam. It can be easy to skip a section with the idea you will come back to it but then forget to return there, which can have a significant impact on your test results. After the Test As you leave the exam room, the last thing you may want to think about is that particular test. You probably have numerous other assignments, projects, and life obligations to attend to, especially if you pushed some of those off to study for this completed exam. Give yourself some space from this exam, but only for the duration of the time when your instructor is grading your exam. Once you have your results, study them—whether you did really well (Go, you!) or not as well as you had hoped (Keep your spirits up!). Both scenarios hold valuable information if you will use it. Consider this example: Thandie had a habit of going all-out for exams before she took them, and she did pretty well usually, but once the instructor passed back the graded tests, she would look at the letter grade, glance half-heartedly at the instructor’s comments, and toss the exam away, ready to move on to the next chapter, section, or concept. A better plan would be to learn from her exam results and analyze both what she did well and where she struggled. After a particularly unimpressive exam outing in her statistics class, Thandie took her crumpled-up exam to the campus tutoring center, where the tutor reviewed the test with her section by section. Together they discovered that Thandie did particularly well on the computational sections, which she admitted were her favorites, and not well at all on the short-answer essay questions that she did not expect to find in a stats class, which in her experience had been more geared toward the mathematical side of solving statistical problems. Going forward in this class, Thandie should practice writing out her explanations of how to compute the problems and talk to her instructor about ways to hone this skill. This tutoring session also proved to Thandie the benefit of holding on to important class papers—either electronically or in hard copy, depending on the class setup—for future reference. For some classes, you probably don’t need to keep every scrap of paper (or file) associated with your notes, exams, assignments, and projects, but for others, especially for those in your major, those early class materials may come in very handy in your more difficult later undergraduate courses or even in grad school when you need a quick refresher on the basic concepts. Test Anxiety Test anxiety can be a common occurrence, but you can use strategies to manage it. (Credit: CUBoulder / flickr Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC-BY 2.0)) Test anxiety is very real. You may know this firsthand. Almost everyone gets a little nervous before a major exam, in the same way most people get slightly anxious meeting a new potential date or undertaking an unfamiliar activity. We second-guess whether we’re ready for this leap, if we prepared adequately, or if we should postpone this potentially awkward situation. And in most situations, testing included, that reasonable level of nervous anticipation can be a good thing—enhancing your focus and providing you with a bit of bravado to get you through a difficult time. Test anxiety, however, can cause us to doubt ourselves so severely that we underperform or overcompensate to the point that we do not do well on the exam. Don’t despair; you can still succeed if you suffer from test anxiety. The first step is to understand what it is and what it is not, and then to practice some simple strategies to cope with your anxious feelings relative to test taking. Whatever you do, don’t use the label test anxiety to keep you from your dreams of completing your education and pursuing whatever career you have your eyes on. You are bigger than any anxiety. Understanding Test Anxiety If someone tries to tell you that test anxiety is all in your head , they’re sort of right. Our thinking is a key element of anxiety of any sort. On the other hand, test anxiety can manifest itself in other parts of our bodies as well. You may feel queasy or light-headed if you are experiencing test anxiety. Your palms may sweat, or you may become suddenly very hot or very cold for no apparent reason. At its worst, test anxiety can cause its sufferers to experience several unpleasant conditions including nausea, diarrhea, and shortness of breath. Some people may feel as though they may throw up, faint, or have a heart attack, none of which would make going into a testing situation a pleasant idea. You can learn more about symptoms of test anxiety from the Anxiety and Depression Association of America that conducts research on this topic. Reteguiz, Jo-Ann. “Relationship between anxiety and standardized patient test performance in the medicine clerkship.” Journal of general internal medicine vol. 21,5 (2006): 415-8. doi:10.1111/j.1525-1497.2006.00419. Back to our minds for a minute. We think constantly, and if we have important events coming up, such as exams, but other significant events as well, we tend to think about them seemingly all the time. Almost as if we have a movie reel looping in our heads, we can anticipate everything that may happen during these events—both sensational results and catastrophic endings. What if you oversleep on the test day? What if you’re hit by a bus on the way to campus? What if you get stung by a mysterious insect and have to save the world on the very day of your exam? How about the other way? You win the lottery! Your screenplay is accepted by a major publisher! You get a multimillion-dollar record deal! It could happen. Typically, though, life falls somewhere in between those two extremes, unless you live in an action movie. Our minds, however, (perhaps influenced by some of those action movies or spy novels we’ve seen and read) often gravitate to those black-and-white, all-or-nothing results. Hence, we can become very nervous when we think about taking an exam because if we do really poorly, we think, we may have to face consequences as dire as dropping out of school or never graduating. Usually, this isn’t going to happen, but we can literally make ourselves sick with anxiety if we dwell on those slight possibilities. You actually may encounter a few tests in your academic careers that are so important that you have to alter your other life plans temporarily, but truly, this is the exception, not the rule. Don’t let the most extreme and severe result take over your thoughts. Prepare well and do your best, see where you land, and then go from there. Using Strategies to Manage Test Anxiety You have to work hard to control test anxiety so it does not take an unhealthy hold on you every time you face a test situation, which for many of you will last well into your careers. One of the best ways to control test anxiety is to be prepared for the exam. You can control that part. You can also learn effective relaxation techniques including controlled breathing, visualization, and meditation. Some of these practices work well even in the moment: at your test site, take a deep breath, close your eyes, and smile—just bringing positive thoughts into your mind can help you meet the challenges of taking an exam without anxiety taking over. The tests in the corporate world or in other career fields may not look exactly like the ones you encounter in college, but professionals of all sorts take tests routinely. Again, being prepared helps reduce or eliminate this anxiety in all these situations. Think of a presentation or an explanation you have provided well numerous times—you likely are not going to feel anxious about this same presentation if asked to provide it again. That’s because you are prepared and know what to expect. Try to replicate this feeling of preparation and confidence in your test-taking situations. Many professions require participants to take frequent licensing exams to prove they are staying current in their rapidly changing work environments, including nursing, engineering, education, and architecture, as well as many other occupations. You have tools to take control of your thinking about tests. Better to face it head- on and let test anxiety know who’s in charge!

College Success


Developing Metacognition Estimated completion time: 8 minutes. Questions to Consider: What is metacognition? What contributes to poor metacognition? What can you do to improve your metacognition and in turn your learning? Consider this scenario: Marcus has studied for his chemistry test by rereading the chapters and looking at his notes. He has spent several hours the night before doing this and feels ready for the test. The concepts are not particularly difficult, but there is a lot to recall. When he takes the test, he feels pretty confident that he has earned at least an 80% (B). He isn’t able to answer all the questions—and knows he could have studied longer—but he feels comfortable with his performance. When he gets the test back, he is surprised to learn he has earned a 54% (F). He has now realized that he didn’t really understand the material well enough to answer the types of questions his professor included. What happened to Marcus and what can he do differently next time? Deep learning, as described earlier in the chapter, is the goal you should be striving for in most if not all of your college classes. The learning process starts with taking in information—through reading, listening, or doing—organizing it in your brain for quick recall or use, and then demonstrating, usually through a test or assignment, that you know the information. However, learning doesn’t end there. As you learn and demonstrate your knowledge, you will receive feedback to help you adjust your learning strategies or reflect the level of learning that has occurred. Feedback can include the following: A grade on a test in which you can see what questions you got right and what you got wrong. Written feedback from an instructor or peer about what you have done well and what can be improved. Immediate feedback on a skill (such as playing a note on an instrument) that indicates you did it correctly or not. The ease or difficulty at which you can recall or explain information that you are learning. This feedback is what you need to help you develop metacognition , which is the awareness of your own learning processes. When you have good metacognition, you can determine what you know and don’t know. You are also able to adjust your learning strategies to improve. Without this feedback, whether it is formal (e.g., a test grade) or informal (you stumble over defining terms), you will have more difficulty improving your awareness. In Marcus’ case, he had poor metacognition because his study strategy, rereading the text and his notes and studying the night before, did not provide him with feedback on what he knew well and what he didn’t. In fact, what Marcus did produced fluency illusion , which is the belief that you know something better than you really do. This fluency illusion occurred because he reread the material and that made him confident that he knew the content. However, Marcus had poor metacognition. Now that Marcus has more feedback from his test, he can use that information to help him determine why he failed to learn the content well enough for the test. Here are the steps for improving your metacognition so that you can adjust your thinking and study strategies for maximum benefit: Choose a study strategy or a combination of them such as the ones described in this chapter, but be sure to include testing yourself (e.g., practice tests, teaching someone else, trying to rewrite notes from memory). As you study, track what you are able to recall easily and what you still struggle with and focus on those areas. Take the test, complete the assignment, or perform the skill. Review the feedback you receive and examine it for what went well and what didn’t. Make adjustments to your study strategies before the next assessment. This feedback loop in which you use that information to make changes is essential to learning. If you don’t look at the grade or feedback and hope to “work harder” next time, you likely won’t be using the specific, effective, efficient learning strategies that could make a difference in the outcome and your grade. Friends & Family Matter Michael’s recently failed test in calculus has rocked his confidence, especially since he has begun to doubt his abilities. While Michael was a good student—As and Bs—in high school, he was initially concerned that he was not ready for the academic expectations of college. This grade made this concern more real. When Michael was in high school, his parents expected that he would never fail any assignment or any course. On the few occasions that he brought home a C or D on an assignment, they would ground him until he raised his grades. He believed he would not be ready for college if he did less than quality work. One time, his parents had a meeting with his high school biology teacher about his progress. They have been involved and concerned about his grades because they wanted the best from and for him. Now that Michael is away from home and doesn’t need to share his grades, he feels uncertain about how to deal with this experience. He knows that his parents cannot contact his professors about his grades, so he doesn’t feel obligated to tell them everything just yet, especially because he has the opportunity to raise his grade in calculus. However, he wants to be honest about what has happened, especially if he cannot raise his grade before the end of the semester and needs to drop the course. He doesn’t want to surprise them with the information. Let’s Think About It Michael has several options. Think through the consequences of each one, and choose the best option or create your own option. Michael chooses not to share this failing grade with his family, so they are not aware of any of his struggles. Michael shares his failing grade although he thinks it will cause undue stress with his family, and he will have to hear a lecture about not being ready for college. Michael talks with his professor and a tutor about a plan to improve his studying and grades, and shares with his family what happened and how he plans to make changes. Let’s Talk About It Michael is not obligated to share his grades with his family unless he feels some obligation or has made a clear commitment to keeping them updated on his progress. Some families make a pact that they will continue to provide support when they see each term’s transcripts. Here are some suggestions for communicating with others about the dilemma that Michael is facing: “I wanted to let you know that I failed a test in my calculus class recently. I don’t want you to be alarmed—many in the class messed up on the first test—but I don’t want you to be surprised if I have to spend more time bringing this grade up. I have a plan and feel confident I can improve.” “I recently struggled on a test because I was overconfident and slacked off. I realize that now and have talked with the professor about what to do differently. He assured me that it was normal and not an indication that I won’t be successful.” “Most of my classes are going well and my grades are good, but I did have a test that I failed. I was surprised, but I realized that I had not prepared appropriately and since then I have met with a tutor and have started studying for the next test now. I even went to see my professor to check my understanding and he confirmed I was studying better.” Whatever choice you would make in this situation, it is always best to communicate clearly your needs, your concerns, and even your uncertainties. Summary and Next Steps to College Success Deepening your learning happens when you study effectively and prepare adequately for taking tests. Learning how to do these well can only help you be more successful. Additionally, this chapter discusses the role that metacognition plays in helping you improve your learning processes. This chapter has provided a variety of tools, strategies, tips and information about how to develop skills that will be most effective for your experience. You can help yourself by taking these guidelines seriously and tracking your progress. If one strategy works better for you in some classes and another is more suited to a different course, keep that in mind when you begin to study. Use all the resources available to you, and you’ll be well on your way to success in college. Studying and test taking skills often need to evolve to meet the needs of college expectations. Even if you have solid skills your first year, you will need to continue to develop, hone, and add to them. To that end, consider what else about developing your memory, honing your study strategies, practicing good test-taking skills, or improving your metacognition you would like to learn or practice. Choose one of the following to explore further this term: Develop a study plan that includes when, where, and how to study. Incorporate spacing, interleaving, and practice testing as study strategies. Eliminate test anxiety by implementing strategies to reduce stress. Monitor self-awareness of how well you are learning and what needs to change.

College Success


Introduction Success in college and in later careers will require you to develop and maintain healthy and productive relationships with people in various roles and from a wide array of backgrounds. (Credit: AXIS Dance / Flickr Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC-BY 2.0)) Michael has been assigned a group project in his sociology course. He doesn’t know his classmates very well and has to present a project at the end of the semester that is worth 30% of his grade. At the end of class, Michael creates a group chat for his classmates and they decide to meet the next day to go over the assignment. Although Michael reminds them, only Kayla shows up, and she is confused as to what they are supposed to do. Michael spends an hour walking her through the assignment and asking her what parts she wants to do, but never hears from the others. When he attends class again, he approaches the group members who missed to see what happened. They both shrug their shoulders and promise they will be there next time and agree to take on significant portions of the assignment. A week later, Michael arranges a meeting for everyone through their group chat to share their progress. This time, only Tyler shows up and has completed half of his part. As the deadline looms, Michael is frustrated and concerned as to how to proceed. What Do You Think? If you were Michael, what would you have thought when you first were assigned the project? What steps would you have taken before the group was to meet? How would you have handled the communication and meetings? How do you feel about group projects? Why do you feel this way? Student Survey How confident are you in building relationships and working with others in college? Take this quick survey to figure it out, ranking questions on a scale of 1—4, 1 meaning “least like me” and 4 meaning “most like me.” These questions will help you determine how the chapter concepts relate to you right now. As you are introduced to new concepts and practices, it can be informative to reflect on how your understanding changes over time. I set healthy boundaries when developing relationships. I have gotten to know at least one professor well. I have developed relationships with my peers in college. I can work productively in groups. You can also take this chapter's survey anonymously online. “For the vast majority of my life, I thought being an Asian-American—who went through the Palo Alto School District—meant that I was supposed to excel in academics. But, in reality, I did the opposite. I struggled through college, both in classes and in seeking experiences for my future. At first, I thought I was unique in not living up to expectations. But as I met more people from all different backgrounds, I realized my challenges were not unique. I began capturing videos of students sharing their educational issues. Like me, many of my peers lack the study skills required to achieve our academic goals. The more I researched and developed videos documenting this lack of skill, the more I realized that student identities are often lost as they learn according to a traditional pedagogy. I began documenting students’ narratives and the specific strategies they used to overcome difficulty. Once we can celebrate a diverse student body and showcase their strengths and identities as well as the skills necessary to excel academically, my hope is that students of all backgrounds can begin to feel that they belong.” —Henry Fan , Foothill College and San Jose State University About This Chapter By the time you finish this chapter, you should be able to do the following: Determine the key components of healthy relationships Discuss steps for managing conflict in relationships. Develop a plan to maximize your relationships in college. Identify the steps for working effectively in a group. Good relationships can mean the difference between an enjoyable college experience and a difficult one. Many students report within their first year that they have experienced loneliness or homesickness whether they live on campus or in another state or country or commute back and forth to college. The good news is that these states are temporary. With time, students who say they are lonely meet more people, get involved in study groups, and get to know their classmates and roommates better. The students who feel homesick or just miss their family, friends, and pets (yes, pets ) also report that once the term gets busier with events, meetings, class work, and studying, they find that the homesickness goes away. This is not to say that quality relationships don't take time or work to develop. In fact, you will want to be mindful of what you can do to start relationships and improve them to create a more enjoyable college experience. This chapter offers specific suggestions that can help you get the most out of living and working with others.

College Success


The Benefits of Healthy Relationships Estimated completion time: 21 minutes. Questions to Consider: How does self-care benefit relationships? Why is community so important to healthy relationships? What can I do to start developing relationships? Relationships are key to happy and healthy lives. According to Dr. Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, people with the best health outcomes were people who “leaned into relationships, with family, with friends, with community.” https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/this-harvard-study-reveals-how-you-can-be-happier-and-more-successful.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9COur%20study%20has%20shown%20that,said%20in%20the%20TED%20Talk. Healthy relationships involve trust, respect, and support. (Credit: Garry Knight / Flickr / Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC-BY 2.0)) Relationships come in many forms: classmates, family, friends, partners, coworkers, team members, and neighbors. Think of a relationship where you have mutual respect and trust, supporting each other in tough times, celebrating the good times, and communicating with ease and honesty. This is a healthy relationship. Do you have someone in mind? On the other hand, if communication is often tense or strained, confidences are broken, or you don’t feel listened to, appreciated, or valued, these are signs of an unhealthy relationship. Unhealthy relationships can have both immediate and longer-term health impacts. If you are unhappy in a relationship, try to improve the relationship, or end it. Do not stay in a relationship for the wrong reasons, such as fear of being alone or guilt. If a partner tries to force you to do something sexually, harms you physically, or is verbally abusive, you are in a particularly unhealthy or dangerous relationship. Even if you believe the person loves you, it does not make up for the harm they are doing to you. End the relationship. Take a moment to assess the health of your relationships. Who are the people who make you smile, who boost your confidence, who truly listen when you need to talk, and who want only the best for you? Investing in these relationships is likely to make you happier and healthier. Relationships are two-way streets. How committed are you to your relationships? How much effort do you put into nurturing your relationships? Self-Care Healthy relationships start with healthy individuals. Self-care is learning to take good care of yourself and to prioritize your own needs. Self-care involves any activity that nurtures and refuels you, such as taking a walk in the woods, going to a yoga class, attending a sporting event, reading a good book, or spending time with friends. When you are feeling calm and nourished, you are going to look forward to your day, and despite how busy it is, you will prioritize time with friends and family. If you don’t take care of and learn to love yourself, you will never be able to bring your best self to any relationship. An important dynamic you bring to any relationship is how you feel about yourself. Self-esteem is about loving yourself and being happy for who you are. Building healthy self-esteem impacts how you see yourself, which can drastically improve your relationships. While low self-esteem won’t keep us from romantic love, it can act as a barrier to a healthy relationship. If you do not believe you are good enough, how can you expect your partner to think so? When you feel secure in yourself, this allows you and your partner to feel more secure about the relationship. If you have insecurities, it may show in your relationship as jealousy, defensiveness, or tension that leads to unnecessary arguments. Healthy self-esteem goes hand in hand with self-confidence, and feeling confident about yourself will translate into a stronger and more satisfying relationship. If you are experiencing low self-esteem, you may give your partner too much credit or stay in a relationship that is not healthy for you. If you find yourself changing your personality for someone else, that is never a sign of a healthy relationship. You can reverse negative self-talk and build your self-esteem. If you catch yourself thinking you are unlovable, unattractive, or not good enough, it’s important to start talking to yourself in a positive way and to celebrate all that is uniquely you. Self-care includes self-forgiveness. We all make mistakes. A misstep isn’t the end of the world. Pick yourself up, put things in perspective, acknowledge any lessons to be learned, focus on all that makes you special, and move forward. Be kind to yourself. The Importance of Community The Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica is home to some of the highest number of centenarians (people who are 100 years old or older) in the world. Costa Ricans in general report a high level of life satisfaction. Dan Buettner, author of the Blue Zones study of the longest living populations in the world, explains that Costa Rica “is a place where religion, family, and social interaction are the main values, unlike trying to get ahead, or financial security, or status. Their cities are set up so they’re bumping into each other all day long. They walk to the markets, where they have conversations with people.” https://www.bluezones.com/2017/10/costa-rica-singapore-two-happiest-places-earth/ In many families in Costa Rica, multiple generations live together under the same roof or nearby where they can be involved in each other’s lives. Neighbors are like extended family, and people often stop in for a visit and go out of their way to help one another. While this isn’t the way many of us live in the United States, the lessons from the Blue Zone study underscore the importance of community and the health benefits of connecting to and staying close to a community. What communities do you belong to? Is your dorm a community? Is a sports team? Is a club or people you volunteer with? When you start seeing the social circles you connect to as communities and prioritize your time to develop more closeness with those communities, you will experience many physical, mental, and emotional health benefits. Joining clubs in college can be an outstanding way to join and build communities. (Credit: SupportPDX, Cerritos College / Flickr / Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC-BY 2.0)) According to an analysis of research on college students (Joe Cuseo, The Most Potent, Research-Based Principles of College Success ), college students who have a higher sense of belonging and are more involved in their college community are more successful. Additionally, college students who are involved in extracurricular, volunteer, and part-time work experiences outside the classroom (less than 20 hours per week) earn higher grades than students who do not get involved in any out-of-class activities at all. Make a list of the communities you belong to. Your list should include formal communities—for example, sports teams, fraternities or sororities, and membership in clubs and other organizations. Your list should also include informal communities—for example, your neighbors or the people you always see at your favorite exercise class. Next to each community, write how being a member of this community benefits you and how your involvement benefits the community. Now, make a new list of your personal interests and passions. How well do these align with the communities you already belong to? Are there new communities that would be a good fit for you? If you are struggling to identify communities you already belong to, think about your passions, causes you care about, and ways you love to spend your time. Find a group or club that aligns with your interests. If you can’t find one that already exists, start a new club! Research has shown that friends provide a sense of meaning or purpose in our lives, and that having a healthy social life is important to staying physically healthy. In a meta-analysis of the research results from 148 studies of over 300,000 participants, researchers found that social relationships are important in improving our lifespan. Social support has been linked to lower blood pressure and better immune system functioning. The meta-analysis also showed that social support operates on a continuum: the greater the extent of the relationships, the lower the health risks. Holt-Lunstad, PLoS Medicine, https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316 According to a 2018 report from the American College Health Association, in a 12-month period, 63 percent of college students have felt very lonely. American College Health Association. (2018). Fall 2018 reference group executive summary https://www.acha.org/documents/ncha/NCHA-II_Fall_2018_Reference_Group_Executive_Summary.pdf If you are feeling lonely or having a hard time making friends, know that the majority of people around you have also felt this way. Joining a group or a club of people who share your interests and passions is one of the best ways to make great friends and stay connected. Lisa Nunn’s (2021) book College Belonging: How First-Year and First-Generation College Students Navigate Campus Life suggests that students experience belonging in three areas: academic belonging, social belonging, and campus-community belonging. Think about how you can take steps to feel as though you belong in each of these three categories and write down what you can do. Realm of Belonging Description Steps You Can Take to Enhance Your Belonging Academic belonging Feeling confident in your classes, asking and answering questions in class, engaging with professors within and outside of class 1. 2. Social belonging Finding friends with shared interests, participating in events and organizations, talking to new people 1. 2. Campus-community Feeling generally accepted by the institution, feeling supported and helped by the programs and people on campus who work to see that you succeed 1. 2. Taking the First Step in a Relationship Consider this scenario: John is a first-year student who has moved several hundred miles away from home to attend college. He is, by self-admission, shy and has difficulty making friends. When he steps into his first class for the term, he meets Praya, a second-year student who says “Hello” when he sits down next to her. She seems outgoing and engaged as she greets others in the class as if she has known them for a long time. He feels out of place. “Hi, Haley. How was your internship over the summer?” Praya asks one student. She asks another student, “Breylin, how do we always have a class together?” John sinks down in his seat, afraid she is going to ask him questions as well. He pulls out his phone and looks through social media to keep her from bothering him. As other students enter the class, some quiet and others talkative, John wonders if he will have to interact with them. Even though he has not met many people yet–and certainly has not had any deep conversations with anyone–he feels anxious about having to get to know strangers and feels most comfortable keeping to himself at least for now. John’s story is not unusual. As you read in the previous section, many first-year college students have difficulty developing relationships in the first few weeks and months of college. The issue is often exacerbated by the constant notifications and vibrations that come from phones, which pull us out of conversations with others. One way to improve your relationship-building skills is to learn the art of small talk, which is the first step in getting to know someone more deeply. Because we often turn to our phones or other distractions when faced with interacting with strangers – or even people we know well – it is no surprise that we haven’t quite developed solid communication skills. If you want to get more involved in campus organizations, feel more comfortable in your classes, and eliminate general awkwardness in most social situations, then practice small talk skills. What can you “small talk” about? Here are some topics that could get you started. The weather–”Wow, the cooler temperatures were a surprise this morning. Are you ready for the snow?” The latest sporting event–”How about our Bears? I can’t believe they won in the final seconds of the game.” Plans for the weekend–”Did you hear about that Halloween party in the park? Have you thought about going?” The current trend on social media–”Did you see that challenge on TikTok?” Majors–”What are you majoring in?” or “Are you a marketing major?” Careers–”What kind of job are you anticipating after graduation?” Schedule–”What are you taking this term? Anything you recommend?” Organizations–”I have been thinking about joining an organization. What are you participating in?” Recreation–”I got to play a new video game last weekend. Are you a gamer?” The class–”I struggled with that homework last night. Was it hard for you?” Of course, tried-and-true compliments work as well as long as you keep them neutral. Admiring someone’s clothing (“Great hoodie! Where did you get that?”) or course resources (“Nice laptop. Do you like using it?”) are safe bets. If you are not sure if you should ask the question or bring up the topic because you are concerned it may be controversial or not taken in the right way, then go with your instinct and choose something from the list above. Once you get to know people better, you can have deeper and more meaningful conversations. One last note about “small talk.” If you struggle with being friendly with others or coming up with something to say in those uncomfortable moments, then commit to practicing your small talk skills. Look for times during the day to try them out such as before class starts, when you are waiting in line, or when you attend an event and don’t know many people. With practice, it gets easier to talk to people you don’t know well. And, who knows? You may find someone who can become a friend. Which apps and websites help you get more comfortable developing relationships? Do you want to meet people who have similar interests? Meetup provides you the opportunity to create interest groups based on your location. You can use the app to create online or in-person groups. Do you want to learn how to start conversations and have fun doing it? Apps such as Real Talk, Make Talk, and Holsom can make starting conversations enjoyable. Learn what kinds of questions to ask that can get people talking and talking and talking. How about training in conflict management? Colorado State’s Conflict Resolution for College Students provides an in-depth course that explores common reasons for conflict and common experiences that college students may encounter and need to manage.

College Success