Comprehensive Strategies for Memory Improvement

Mnemonic techniques such as imagery and organisation are useful, but on their own they are somewhat simplistic and can underestimate just how complex memory tasks and the difficulties people face while memorising actually are. For this reason, psychologists have also proposed a broader, more comprehensive approach to memory improvement, built directly around applying what is known about how memory processes work.

One recommendation is to engage in deep level processing. Building on Craik and Lockhart's levels-of-processing work, which showed that processing information in terms of its meaning leads to considerably better memory than merely attending to its surface features, this strategy involves deliberately asking as many questions as possible about new material, thinking through what it means, and examining how it connects to facts already known. Doing this makes new information genuinely part of a person's existing knowledge framework, and this in turn increases the number of ways that information can later be accessed and remembered.

A second recommendation is to minimise interference, since interference, as covered earlier in the chapter, is a major cause of forgetting. Interference is at its worst when very similar material is learned one right after the other, so it helps to avoid studying closely related subjects back to back — picking an unrelated subject to study next is preferable. Where that is not possible, distributing study or practice across time, with intermittent rest periods built in, also helps reduce interference between similar material.

A third recommendation is to deliberately give oneself enough retrieval cues. While studying, a person should actively identify the retrieval cues already present within the study material and link specific parts of that material to those cues. Isolated cues are considerably easier to remember than an entire body of content, and the associative links a learner builds between a cue and the content it points to make retrieval noticeably easier later on.

Thomas and Robinson developed a further, more structured strategy specifically to help students remember more of what they study, known by the acronym PQRST: Preview, Question, Read, Self-recitation, and Test. Preview means taking a brief, cursory look through the material to become familiar with its overall contents before studying it properly. Question means actively raising questions about the material and looking to the lesson itself for the answers. Read means reading the material with the specific aim of finding answers to the questions already raised. After reading, the learner should attempt to rewrite, in their own words, what they have just read, and finally test how much of it they are actually able to recall and understand. …