Motivation and Learning Strategies for College Success : A Self-management Approach

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UNDERSTANDING LEARNING AND MEMORY 41

admit I experienced a few during my undergraduate days, is the best

example of massed practice. Although this practice method may be effec-

tive in learning a large amount of basic information in a short time, it

is a poor method of learning and remembering complex information.

Think about the examinations on which you used massed practice.

How much of the content did you remember a few days after the

examination?

Rehearsal strategies can be very effective in some types of learning.

Copying material, taking verbatim notes, reciting words or definitions,

and underlining material in handouts or textbooks are all examples

of rehearsal strategies. However, the limitation in the use of rehearsal

strategies is that they make few connections between the new infor-

mation and the knowledge we already have in LTM. Therefore, if the

information is not connected to anything when it is stored in LTM,

it is difficult to retrieve. Your goal as a learner is to try to make the

information meaningful if you want to increase the probability that

you will remember it. For the most part, underlining is one of the

least effective learning strategies used by college students.

Let’s now turn to the two major learning strategies that will help

you learn more information—elaboration and organization.

Elaboration Strategies

Elaboration strategies help retention by linking new information to

information already in your LTM. These strategies can be very useful

for improving the recall of names, categories, sequences, or groups of

items. For basic learning, two popular mnemonics include acronyms

and the key-word method. Acronyms use the first letter in each word

to form a mnemonic. My earlier example about the order of the plan-

ets is an acronym. Here are some other popular acronyms:

HOMES

The five Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie,

Superior (geography)

Roy G. Biv

The colors of the spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue,

indigo, violet (physics)

King Phillip came over from Greece singing

The classification of organisms: kingdom, phylum, class,

order, family, genus, species (biology)

A useful mnemonic for learning foreign language vocabulary is the

key-word method, which involves the creation of an image that relates