Memorisation is one of school’s biggest challenges, especially for students with dyslexia or working memory difficulties.
Tips and Tricks for Memorisation
From historical dates to science terms to foreign language vocabulary, revising for exams includes a lot of memorisation. Memorising information can be difficult for many students, especially those with dyslexia or other working memory difficulties. Dealing with large amounts of information can be overwhelming. Realising you can’t remember everything you studied last week can be stressful.
Learning good memorisation techniques can help make revising simpler and easier, and leave more time for practising skills, preparing for exam questions, and completing coursework. Here are some memorisation techniques you can add to your study routine today.
Use Your Senses
People are said to remember on 10% of what they read, but 50% of what they hear and see and 90% of what they say as they do something. The more senses you tap into whilst studying, the better you’ll retain information. Make your studying interactive. Read your notes aloud or teach them to a classmate. Narrate aloud how to answer problems and use key information. Use games, activities, and discussions to review facts and concepts. These changes add sounds and motions to your revision, making it more memorable. In addition, actively recalling information – quizzing yourself or practising using information – often leads to better memorisation than passive studying, such as reading through your notes.
Multisensory studying can be particularly helpful for dyslexic students. It doesn’t just involve making your studying more active. You can also use the environment around you to tap into your senses. Try listening to music or using scented oils or candles to boost your brain power. Turn information into songs or link facts to smells, sounds, or colours. This gives you something more memorable to recall than words on a page. You can also add variety into your studying environment. If you study in the same location, you may associate the information you’re revising with that space, making it difficult to remember somewhere else, like the exam hall. Instead, study in different locations, making associations with a wide variety of senses and environments.
Mnemonic Devices
Many students find mnemonic devices – memory tricks – to be useful for retaining information. One such trick, loci, involves linking facts to a familiar room, route, or process, like your walk to school. Connect each fact to a stage (for example, each street corner you turn), then move through this familiar route, recalling each piece of information as you go. This is a very sensory technique and is particularly good for dyslexic students.
There are many other memorisation techniques you can use for different kinds of information. For lists, you might take the first letter of each name or keyword and turn them into an acrostic, an abbreviation or memorable phrase (for example, SOHCAHTOA for trigonometry and ‘Father Charles Goes Down And Ends Battle’ for music theory). For numbers, you might break larger numbers into smaller chunks. Or you might assign meaning to seemingly random words or digits: does a historical leader have a friend’s name? Or is a date similar to a family member’s birthday?
Making information meaningful is a key part of memorisation. One of the best ways to assign meaning is to remember how it fits into the larger material. You might think about how the properties of water influence biology, or how one historical event leads to others. Or you might use information when practising skills, remembering how formulae helps you solve certain problems or how literary techniques are used in different styles of writing. As you revise, keep your information organised by topic and make sure you understand all of it. It will become much easier to memorise once it makes sense to you.
Use Your Time Wisely
Cramming the night before an exam isn’t the best option, especially for dyslexic students. Students with dyslexia and other working memory difficulties often need to over-learn, studying information repeatedly until it becomes automatic. For all students, repetition is key to memorisation. Return to information at increasing intervals: after one day, after a few days, after one week, after a few weeks. You can also increase your understanding of the material over time, such as starting by summarising the material, then evaluating which facts are most important, then explaining why it’s important, then teaching it to someone else. These techniques help build your long-term memory.
Different students may find different schedules to be useful. For some students, interleaving is a useful technique. This involves alternating skills, for example, moving from French vocabulary to physics terms then key characters from Macbeth. For other students, especially those with working memory difficulties, a linear approach is better. This involves working step-by-step through a project and not jumping around.
Finally, remember to stay organised and include time for rests, both with short-term and long-term studying. Taking care of your body are crucial to keeping your mind fresh and ready for memorisation. Eating well, staying hydrated, and exercising are all important to keeping you at the top of your game. Rest and sleep are also key, and not just because it keeps you healthy and alert. Sleeping shortly after studying helps the information to stay in your brain. Try studying a few flashcards before bed and you’ll remember them better.
For more tips on scheduling, check out our blog post here.
Ensuring you understand your lessons and reviewing your notes over and over are central to memorising information for school. Active studying, linking studying to senses, and mnemonic devices are all useful for memorisation. In particular, multisensory studying and over-learning are helpful for students with dyslexia and other working memory difficulties, boosting brainpower and making recall automatic. Finally, following a good schedule is important for maximising your revision.
Different students and different subjects require different styles of revision. Some memorisation techniques work better for some students. As you prepare for an exam, try different techniques until you find what works. Knowing the best techniques for you is the best way to succeed at memorisation.
