Study Prof

Part four of 5 Easy Review Tricks series — See the other parts at the bottom of this post.

4. Draw it out. If you aren’t taking a pencil and making your own charts, graphs, illustrations, diagrams, mind maps, topical doodles, etc. then you are losing out on one of the best memory mastery techniques there is.

Most students only draw in their notes what the professor draws on the board or shows in her PowerPoint.  For shame. Copying down what you see before you will help recall, but it’s nowhere near as powerful as coming up with your own illustration. Recall from earlier posts, the most powerful way to recall info is to use elaboration–doing something with the info. So do something with the info–illustrate it.

“But I ain’t a good drawrer,” you protest. Pshah! You don’t need to be. These pictures aren’t for anyone but yourself. Use stick figures, basic geometric shapes, and labels. You’ll be fine. For an in-depth how-to, take a look at The Back of the Napkin, by Dan Roam. My own review of the book ended up at, “not worth buying, but definitely worth looking through.” You may decide to buy … more power to ya. BONUS: Most of us recall images much more easily than words.

Take a look at these examples. Note that we ain’t talking Mona Lisa here; legible is all we are going for. The one from the NASA engineer led to a tremendous breakthrough in the aerospace field.

Never Forget

Part Three of 5 Easy Review Tricks series — See the other parts at the bottom of this post.

3. Follow the Triple The Time (TTT) Rule Long Term. Continue to learn/review in loops over days and weeks, not just during a given study session. Review a given set of notes/flashcards/vocab list 24 hours later, 3 days later, 9 days later, etc. (more…)

Part Two of 5 Easy Review Tricks series — See the other parts at the bottom of this post.

2. Learn in loops. Learning a fact is like repeatedly squashing flat a blade of grass until it stays flat. If you try to squash that grass flat by stepping on it once a week, it will recover each week and you’ll have to squash it anew. If however, (more…)

Part One — See the other parts at the bottom of this post.

Choose the answer below that best completes the sentence:

Aaaargh! I’ve been through this ____________ 50 frakkin times, and I still can’t remember it all!

A. Asinine text book chapter

B. Drool-inducing stack of flash cards

C. Styooopid vocab list

D. Bummunching set of notes

E. All of the above

(more…)

See if you can best me in a memory test and lend a helpful brain-cell to University of Edinburgh psychologists in the process. Schlepp on over to the BBC memory test and take twenty minutes to test out your memory muscles. Then click “more” below to see how I did.

Take a screen shot of your results, so you’ll be able to compare yours with mine, and make sure to read through the short article after you submit your results … valuable memory stuff there. (more…)

I’ve written elsewhere about using a daily to-do list in conjunction with a calendar to make your schedule bow down before the awesomeness that is you, but does your to-do list get to “done”? Here are five simple ways to put some serious smack-down on daily tasks by pimping your to-do list.

1. Make sure you can do ‘em. Having a hulking, obnoxious, hairy task sitting on your to-do list glaring at you is a recipe for procrastination. Chop that beast down to size. No single task on your list should take more than an hour. If it takes longer than that, you need to break it down into (more…)

The heck you say!

No, it’s true, at least according to Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Of course, you can’t watch just any ol’ television tripe; you’ll need to watch shows with complex plots that force you to pay attention and work a bit to figure out what the heck is happening. Shows such as E.R., Lost, and Flash Forward should fit the bill.

A sparing application of boob-tube therapy may be just what the psychologist ordered. So watch a little TV guilt free.

More scrumptious FREE practice tests than you can shake a stick at for the GRE, SAT, and GMAT. Regular readers will know that sometimes third-party tests can be sub-par, but a quick perusal of some of the GRE tests shows only very minor errors. Let me know in the comments if you find big problems on any of the other sections. Still, gobs of great practice for the low low price of zero dollars. Thank you, Mathurs! Click the logo to check it out…

Not all profs are created equal. Many of them, through no fault of their own, have foreign accents that make them slightly tougher to understand than Charlie Brown’s teacher. Some have only a passing acquaintance with public speaking skills, and I’m pretty sure some of my profs weren’t actually fully Homo sapiens. What’s a student to do? Enter Einztein.com. Do a quick search for your topic of choice and get instant, free access to a lecture on said topic from superb professors at top-shelf universities around the globe. Click on the logo to see for yourself.

Dust off those synapses and belly up to the brain bar, pardner. You’re going to like this. Website Smart.fm takes some of my favorite learning principals (staggered review, automaticity, the Ebbinghaus learning curve, and more) and puts them all together in one slick and sociable site. Enter in whatever info you want to sear into your cerebellum or take advantage of the memory sets others have already created.

Take a peek at the intro video and then go give it a whirl. Click the pic to watch the video at YouTube.