I have difficulty remembering the material that I have studied (B6).
Why do you have problems in remembering the material that you have studied? The answer to this question requires that you understand the distinction between (1) Short Term Memory (STM), (2) Medium Term Memory (STM) and (3) the Long Term Memory (LTM). Mastering your STM will help you in studying material more efficiently. Mastering your MTM will help you to create a feasible week plan (B9) and learn how to efficiently spend your time in the days before an exam. Mastering your LTM will help you to develop a more feasible plan for the semester (B10) and engage in a more continuous (virtuous) cycle of learning and relearning. In particular for your MTM and LTM a number of techniques are available like Mind Mapping.
Immediate Exam
Preparation Many students use their MTM incorrectly in the immediate period preceding an exam. This happens in particular when they want to study new material. This information is automatically stored in your MTM, which might saturated and can not be used for repetition of already studied material. For instance, in case you have already digested (studied and repeated) 80% of the material, studying the remaining 20% one day before the exam, might substitute that information for the 80%. What can you do, then? Primarily repetition and understanding. A few days prior to an exam you can use your MTM to learn by heart particular kinds of detailed information which are tested regularly, but which you yourself might not find particularly relevant. What you consider relevant depends on your learning style (B5). You might for instance find it much more important to know where you can find the information than to reproduce it. For an exam this attitude contains considerable risks, since you are supposed to reproduce substantial amounts of information and are not sure what level of detail the teacher might ask (B3). Under these circumstances you make more actively use of your MTM. As long as you know where to find those details in your memory while you do the exam, you do not have to store them permanently in your memory. For example, when you are studying tax law it might be useful to know that there are different types of taxes, the amount and the approximate applicability of those taxes to different income levels. A few days before the exam you should memorise the exact data on all the different income levels by repeating the figures a number of times. The more you have been able to figure out a system for the material that you have been studying – for instance in the form of a Mind Map - the more knowledge can be transferred to other parts of your memory. Therefore, there will be more unoccupied space left in your MTM for details like names, technical terms, figures, exact historical dates. Moreover, a large number of exams in a short period of time (the practice at many universities) present the student with a substantial assault on the physical condition; Especially in the case of studying from early in the morning to late at night for a number of weeks consecutively. The more time you have during the exam period to do short repetition exercises and get a good night’s sleep, the bigger the chance that you will keep fit, even for the last exam.
