How to boost your memory for exams

Woman with her hands to her head staring at a laptop screen.

When studying for your exam you are heavily reliant on your level of understanding the set concept and your memory. But how do you improve your memory? Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels.

Published Nov 20, 2020

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When studying for your exam you are heavily reliant on your level of understanding the set concept and your memory. But how do you improve your memory? Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels.

When studying for your exam you are heavily reliant on your level of understanding the set concept and your memory. But how do you improve your memory?

Here are a few things you can try that can help jog your memory.

Keep a clean space

For you to remember things you have to have focus. Messy spaces create distractions and that distraction will prevent you from focusing and remembering what you are studying.

Visualise

Memory is best triggered by our senses. So when you are able to see or touch something you are most likely to remember it. The trick is to try to visualise the information you have learnt. So create posters, rhymes if you must.

Use acronyms

Online learning website, Grade Power Learning suggests that creating patterns and words from the information you need to remember helps. Associating the first letter of each item with a word, phrase, or rhyme, can make information easier to recall. These tricks are especially useful to help remember lists and ordered information.

Start with the sections you already understand well

Starting with the easier sections and then building your knowledge of understanding from that point helps you remember strategically as you have learnt them. When you study your memory can hold in a limited number of bits of information at any given time. The exact size of these bits depends on your level of prior knowledge.

Teach someone else

Tell someone what you have learnt. Try explaining the information that you know and that will help you identify aspects you have not fully understood. Your long-term memory generally has infinite capacity, but it’s only a storage structure. So, just because you have something stored there, doesn’t mean you can effectively and efficiently retrieve it.

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