Would you like to start the new year off on the right foot and do everything in your power to ensure a successful session? To achieve this, why not use effective means to improve knowledge acquisition, retention and retrieval?
Gyslain Giguère, lecturer in Cognitive Processes 1 at the Université de Montréal’s Department of Psychology, gives an overview of human attentional and memory processes, and presents ways of exploiting them to promote learning.
And what better time than the start of the new school year to adopt good practices right away? "Organizing work sessions as early as possible is the best way to reduce stress and anxiety and avoid sleepless nights, which are completely unnecessary*," confirms the teacher.
Distribute learning
There’s no point in running, you have to start on time. According to Gyslain Giguère, this is the saying that best describes the tactic to prioritize in order to maximize your chances of achieving good results.Basically, it’s not advisable to study the material all at once just before the exam, but rather to start early and tackle the task often. "By spreading the study of the same content over two separate days, you create two distinct traces in your memory and are twice as likely to be able to retrieve the material," he explains.
Also, spreading study over several days helps avoid the "feeling of familiarity" that arises when content is studied several times in a single day. "The second study session becomes less effective, since the brain says to itself ’I already know that’ and therefore pays less attention to it," notes Gyslain Giguère. Besides, you have to respect the attention limit and not exceed 90-minute sessions, ideally interspersed with breaks."
Interacting with the material
Gyslain Giguère also suggests various techniques for optimizing information retention when attending a course. Firstly, asking questions, taking part in discussions and answering questions all help to engage learners in their learning and make their memories richer, gathering more clues for retrieving the material.Secondly, he points out, taking notes by hand rather than on a computer significantly increases performance. "Studies are clear: people are so used to typing that they do it very quickly and can therefore transcribe verbatim what teachers say. They’re not actually understanding what’s being said, unlike the cadence of handwritten notes, which force you to organize and reduce information to keep only the important stuff," observes the teacher.
Generally speaking, the more complex you play with the material, the more you work on organizing it, making connections between concepts - but also with your own personal experience - the more in-depth the processing of information becomes.
Produce content and test yourself
For Gyslain Giguère, the most effective way to retain information is to produce a study document, taking the time to organize the content yourself. Borrowing your neighbor’s notes is the worst method," he laughs. When you shape the material yourself, clean up your notes, summarize in your own words, you make an extra cognitive effort that improves retention. It’s the ’generation effect’ that produces deeper traces."The teacher adds that self-testing - with flashcards, for example - is also an effective way of encoding information.
Both tactics are part of "retrieval practices", learning strategies that rely on the action of "bringing out" information through memory efforts. As this process represents an increased mental challenge, learning is reinforced.
"Simply rereading the material has the effect of increasing one’s confidence in knowing the material, but that knowledge isn’t real; you learn much better when you treat the study as a test," he argues.
In short, it makes more sense to express the material than to print it.
Beyond techniques, good hygiene
Sleep, sleep, sleep...*On the subject of sleepless nights, Roger Godbout , Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry and Addictology at UdeM, points out that performance on a test will be better if you’ve had a good night’s sleep beforehand, rather than having spent the night studying.
"The knowledge we’ve been exposed to during the day is first encoded temporarily during wakefulness, then consolidated and stabilized during sleep. These encodings are reactivated during deep slow-wave sleep and deposited in long-term memory, resulting in enhanced cognitive performance the following day. On the same night, REM sleep stabilizes long-term memory, reducing interference by pruning out information that is less relevant to good performance", explains the researcher.
... and eating well
"Studies have shown that a healthy diet promotes better memory, faster reasoning and improved overall brain function," says Guylaine Ferland , professor in the Department of Nutrition at UdeM.
The recent Food Guide for a Healthy Brain - to which the researcher contributed - recommends incorporating more berries (sources of polyphenols), walnuts and oily fish (sources of plant-based omega-3), as well as cruciferous and leafy green vegetables (sources of vitamin K).
