Have you ever felt like you’re on an endless uphill battle to remember what you learn in class?

Well, you’re not alone – this is one of the most common struggles reported by students at all levels of education. Even if you think you understand a topic when you’re furiously writing notes to keep up with your teacher, the real test comes in the exam room when you have to fumble through the millions of other things your brain remembers to pull out the answer to a question.

Make no mistake: your brain is a powerful beast, capable of performing tasks beyond the limits of even the most advanced computer (well, for now, anyway). The great thing is that there are several different ways to tame the beast and use the inner workings of memory to your advantage. Read on to find out how!

Revise information soon after you’ve learnt it.

If you’re the type to take a few notes in class then stash them away until only days or weeks before your exam at the end of the year, we’ve got some bad news for you here! This technique won’t commit the information you learn to your long-term memory.

Because your brain takes in so much data every day, your job is to work with it to continually expose it to the information you want to remember. This ideally means that after you’ve learnt a topic in class for the first time, you go over it that evening, even if only briefly. Your brain is wired to remember patterns, and if you’ve seen the same new concept twice in one day, that’s the beginning of a pattern!

Now, no judgement of course – every year students will take a risk and leave their study until the last possible minute, and often many of them will do reasonably well. Hats off to you if you’re able to do this, but the point here is that even if you can work miracles in the exam room, you can guarantee you’ll forget the information shortly after you walk out the door. If you intend to carry on with a subject in later years of school or at university, you’d probably agree that it’s a waste of time to be re-learning your subjects every year just because you procrastinated your study! It’s much easier to adopt a ‘little and often’ approach to revision to avoid losing new concepts into the ether as soon as you’ve learnt them.

Summarise and break down concepts as simply as you can.

When you learn a concept for the first time, it’s often difficult to get your head around the landscape of how things work. When we talk about a landscape, we’re thinking of a few things: how does the concept relate to others that you’ve learnt? What are the causes and effects of the concept? How often do those working in the field rely on the concept, or on other pieces built on the concept? This is something that’s difficult to get your head around until you’ve worked through your notes in a methodical manner to pull out the critical parts.

If you’ve taken good notes on a topic in class, and revised these notes within a day or two (don’t forget that part!), then the next step is to take these notes and break them down into the most important pieces of information. You might start with a six-page-long raw set of notes. Then, your first job might be to take the main headings and fit them onto only three pages. If you’re feeling adventurous after that, you might try to fit everything into a diagram onto one page.

Every time you break down your notes, you’re forcing yourself to use your memory to fill in the blanks. If you do this a few times, then you’ll progressively remember more and more. The goal of putting the topic on a single page is not that you forget everything that’s not on the page – the goal is to cut through the noise and leave you with as small a set of notes as possible to trigger your memory about what each of the main points means.

Teach someone else what you know.

If you’re familiar with the Feynman Technique, you’ll know the value of this one!

There are various ‘levels of understanding’ to a topic (and, while we’re on a roll, you can learn more about how these levels are categorised in Bloom’s Taxonomy here). The important point for now, though, is that the most basic level of understanding is simply reading through your notes and making sense of what you’ve written. It’s easy to convince yourself that just because you can understand your notes, you’ll be able to recall and write proficiently about them in an exam. Unfortunately, if you close your books then and there, you’ll often be sorely disappointed when you open your exam script and pull up blanks from your memory bank!

Let’s fast-forward to serving you up with a ticket to one of the highest levels of understanding in a topic. Once you think you get a concept, all you need to do is to close your book and teach it to someone who doesn’t understand it very well yet. As well as doing them a favour with some free tutoring, you’re actually solidifying your own knowledge by exposing your own areas of weakness.

Keep your notes close by, because they might ask some curly questions that you don’t know how to answer. This is the real value of teaching someone else, and it’s your opportunity to return to what you’ve learnt so you can both figure out the correct answer. There’s no hiding from your own lack of understanding when you’re teaching a concept, so keep this one as a useful trick up your sleeve!

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