An infallible technique to learn better? Varying the contexts with which a word is stored helps to reactivate their memory more easily.
The advice that anyone who feels to give to those who have to face an exam is always the same: Start in time, don’t reduce yourself to the last! But multiplying study sessions so as to dilute learning in several weeks (or months) is not the only useful tip to learn more effectively. Another advice, which comes from a research just published in the magazine Pnasis of vary as much as possible the way we memorize (and later, we fall) certain information.
The change is your friend. A team of psychologists from the University of Social and Humanistic Sciences of Warsaw (Poland) has tested a technique to enhance the learning based onintroduce some variety in the way of learning: in practical terms, it means memorizing information or knowing a phenomenon from different perspectives, or in many different ways. According to this experimental hypothesis, also the re -enactment process Information should take place in response to different, not identical suggestions, so as to get used to the brain to search for an learned memory driven by different stimuli and not only one.
A word, many examples. According to scientists, the more we are able to multiply the roads we create in the learning phasethe more the chances of effectively recovering that specific information we seek effectively, when for example we are asked during the examination phase.
The team invited a group of volunteers to learn a series of words in a foreign language (the Finn), presenting the terms to be memorized within a phrase in their mother tongue (for example: dad is sweeping the lactiathat is, the floor). During the training, each word has been presented several times, or in the same phrase recurred on five occasions, or in different sentences (the child is playing on lactia; There is a carpet on the lactia; The dog sleeps on the lactia…).
Varying is better than repeating. The best memory performances in translating the words learned, both immediately and after 24 hours, were obtained When the volunteers had learned a word in different contextsseeing it inserted in different sentences. Nonetheless, the volunteers said they were convinced that they had learned better when they had repeated the same sentence several times, even if they were denied by the best results obtained with “varied” learning. For scientists, this “illusion” could lead us to invest in less effective learning methods in making us learn.
Difficult is better. Of course, this method requires a greater investment of time and resources in the learning phase, but repays with a better storage of information. To put it in the words of the authors of the study, “a little difficulty in learning is desirable”.
