Studying science has as its foundation the scientific method.
If you find the many techniques to be so intimidating that you want to avoid adopting even one of them, please relax. First, you can pick and choose which ones to use. They are all meant to help you make strong impressions of new information, make good associations and to use associations to recall information when you need it. Almost any of them will work. Second, it is natural to find them harder to use at first and then easier and easier, because these techniques are skills that you can improve with practice.
When you find
know and tell yourself that the source of the difficulty lies in the nature of science.
Purpose: To keep you from feeling like a personal permanent failure and giving up on a class. Although any science courses contain a large quantity of new complex material and require learning new skills in problem-solving, these difficulties are the kind that can be conquered by studying in several effective ways. Exception: If you are having trouble in a course that is part of a sequence and if you lack the prerequisites, it may be wise to take a prerequisite class.
Work to understand the facts and
principles before you try to memorize
Purpose: Your understanding will build a lot of memory without special effort and will leave you with fewer things to deliberately memorize.
Work to associate new information
to things you already know.
Do not limit yourself to associating the chunks of new information just to each other. Purpose: Associations are fundamental to memory, and associations to already known information are much easier to make and will last longer than associations to other new information.
Keep asking and answering the
question “Why does this make sense?”
By doing so you will associate new information to things you know already.
Purpose: To find what is important, to organize the new information into the patterns that scientists use, and to build associations to material that can be otherwise difficult to find associations to.
Purpose: To build associations for your memory that link verbal and visual memories.
Purpose: To build memory for hard-to-memorize things.
Study worked-out solved problems and practice, practice, practice over a period of several days. Do not passively learn only the knowledge and principles because that kind of learning does not build skills.
Purpose: To adapt your study methods to the different learning needed for skills.
Purpose: To make sure you create accurate, strong learning and do so within a reasonable amount to time.
2. Page on Prereading Science Assignments
Page 3. The first reading of a science assignment.
The reason: When a science book is presenting a large mass of new and complex material, your mind will normally have all it can do to merely understand sentences and ideas at a simple level. Later, after you have reread the chapter, studied it, and gone to class, you will understand the larger relationships among the various parts of the material. If you try to use SQ3R on the first reading, it will simply make you put more chunks of information into your working memory than it can hold and thus you will lose both understanding and memory.
Pay attention to the meanings so that you will notice whether you understand or not. When statements do not make sense, use techniques to help you understand. [See below.]
in the writing like sentences, paragraphs and short passages. Read and pause, read and pause. Purpose: To let your mind assemble the parts you just read to give you the meaning of the whole unit. This assembly of meaning happens fairly automatically as long as you are intentionally looking for meaning and paying attention to the meanings.
Reason: When you read a second time, you will be wiser in selecting what to mark.
Page 4. Second Reading of a science chapter or section.
Purpose: To do a deep processing of the material in order to create associations that build memory naturally. Approach the phrases, sentences and passages with a question: What kind of statement is it? [See below for some possibilities.]
Purpose: You want to avoid a dull repetition of reading it again because you won’t think about it deeply and thus won’t go further in building memory. You want to do a quite different mental task that you will pay attention to and make associations to.
Most any mental processing you do will help your memory. But the more of the suggested topics you find and mark, the deeper your mental processing will be and the better your understanding and memory are likely to be.
These statements are fundamental to the goals of science.
When you find them, mark them. I suggest you mark in the adjacent margin a D for definition, an F for a descriptive fact, and a C for a cause-and-effect statement.
They are the concept itself, the word that names the concept, the verbal definition of it, visual images of it, procedures to use the concept to solve problems and ways to measure it. (Measurement is important because scientists use measurement to make their descriptions and to make their explanations precise and susceptible to gathering evidence).
Purpose: To gather all the related parts of a concept together. To prepare you to handle test questions that link definitions and examples and related procedures together.
When the parts of a concept are spread out in a chapter over several pages, you may find it useful to mark the page numbers of additional related references near the original definition.
Many science books present a theory and then describe some of the research studies and evidence that bear on the theory positively and negatively. Note these links. For example, suppose a theory is presented on page 111 and studies are described on pages 113, 117, and 121, then make a note in the margin by the theory “See pp. 113, 117, 121”. Such notes will greatly ease your reviewing later. It will also prepare for a test question that asks you to evaluate the evidence for and against that theory.
History of science on the topics;
Descriptions of the tools, gadgets, machines, and instruments that gather data;
Worked-out sample problems that demonstrate how to solve problems;
Any kind of information that will be hard to learn because it is not intrinsically meaningful: proper names, technical terms, foreign words, dates, numbers, formulas, and arbitrary facts.
of finding and classifying and marking different statements about the scientific topics, you will both have built a lot of understanding of the big picture and have created a lot of memory very naturally by making many associations. You will be prepared for your final review sessions before your test.
Page 5. Final study sessions.
especially the hard-to-learn ones, by making strong impressions and creating associations, and making still more contacts with the material.
Although you will do most of your studying in the days before a test, also do a special review of the most difficult material a few minutes or an hour or so before a test. Purpose: To get the benefits of recency, the mind’s ability to better remember things that have been recently used. This is a powerful benefit to memory.
Study until you know them to your satisfaction.
Do not merely reread the material any longer, except when necessary to rebuild your understanding. The purpose for self-tests is to reveal what you know and do not yet know in order to plan what to study. Moreover, any self-test question that you ask and answer constitutes practice, and practice builds memory.
Purpose: To stay within the capacity limits of your working memory. If you study sentences that are too large, your mind cannot wrap itself around them, and the time it takes you to process them will lead them to fade and you’ll just have to reread them.
Purpose: To make yourself as conscious as possible to the precise information. Questions and answers are very powerful because the mind associates to goals as well as to ordinary stimuli, and a question sets a goal.
Exception to using words: When testing yourself on visual material, ask and answer visually or by drawing answers. When testing yourself on skills, then pose a problem and solve it.
You may have already used this question in your first reading of the chapter as you tried to understand it. Now you use it as a way to create more associations that build memory. Asking this question is not the same as a self-test, because the answer to a self-test question will be more specific information from the text than will your reasons why a fact or cause-effect link makes sense to you.
of information in the same order that you expect will match the order of questions and answers on tests or in real-life situations. Purpose: Memories of cue and target information are sensitive to the sequence that they are learned in. If you learn Fact 1 and use it to trigger Fact 2, but get asked on a test to recall Fact 1, your learning sequence may not permit you to start by thinking of Fact 2 as a trigger for Fact 1.
Look at information, look away, ask a question, give an answer, look back and check what the real answer is, correct yorself and try again.
Study one item. Study a second, then study both until perfect. Study a third, then study all three until perfect. And so on—up to fifteen or twenty items. Then start a new set.
Page 6. Studying problem-solving and other procedures.
Purpose: To link the general directions to specific example problems so that you can better generalize what to do when you solve real homework or test problems. Research shows that studying worked-out example problems is a powerful method.
and see if you can read the first few steps and recall the last step by yourself. Then cover up the last two steps and see if you can read the first few steps and recall both last steps by yourself. And so on. This procedure will strengthen your skill in handling homework and test problems.
that you read the text about the topic. Purpose: To do the homework while the text information is still fresh in your mind. To prevent a long delay from making your memory fade.
Purpose: To consolidate your memory for the general pattern of steps to take. To build an association between your memory for what you did and the pattern of steps.
for using the techniques successfully. Purpose: To give yourself a positive reinforcement. To reinforce your use of the techniques in addition to the nice feel of success because it is the techniques you want to recall, not just a glow from a success.
to the scientific concepts, descriptions, explanations, and predictions. Purpose: To link the procedural skills with the general textbook knowledge.
You can practice by doing several new problems in a certain category. Trying new problems is preferential. But you can also benefit by simply redoing a problem you have done before—as long as you think it through from the beginning without jumping to the answer and skipping the intermediate steps.
Purpose: To strengthen the new skill. Skills have to be learned by multiple practices, unlike learning of ordinary information which can sometimes be learned in one contact.
Page 7. Recalling science knowledge
A “retrieval mode” is a frame of mind in which you awaken a goal of recalling some target knowledge and use certain methods. Purpose: To protect you from giving up efforts to recall information if it doesn’t come in 2 seconds.
by thinking of information and images that were linked to the target information. If you sense a hole where the knowledge ought to be, do not just focus on that blank feeling. Instead, think of other things that you expect are related to the target because as you feed your mind those cues they will awaken associations to the target. When successful, the answer will appear suddenly in your mind.
Any of these thoughts and several may start your association process going. Even if one does not seem to work immediately, your thinking of several cues will cumulatively warm up the buried information until it surfaces.
Often thoughts and images will contain elements that in themselves are associated to the target, and as you think of them, they will trigger more associations. Do not dismiss thoughts and images just because they are not the perfect answer.
If conditions permit you to wait a bit, allow 30 to 60 seconds for your mind to retrieve the target. If you have tight time limits in a test, then after you start thinking of cues to trigger associations, then shake your head and blink your eyes, go on to other questions, and return later. Often the desired information will arise spontaneously.
Page 8. Getting more out science lectures and demonstrations.
because it will save study time. You will be able to prepare for tests and other performance demands faster when you get more from a lecture. Do not downgrade the usefulness of class lectures.
Do a preview or overview from written material--if it is possible--so that your mind is warmed up. Pay attention to meaning. Think over the meaning of units like sentences and passages. When you do not understand, ask questions. Mark things in your notes that you do not understand. Make mental imagery of what the instructor says. When the lecturer talks about a diagram or other graphic, go back and forth in your mind between the words and the graphic.
Purpose: To activate associations to what is said, trigger deep processing and build understanding and some memory.
Watch the professor’s hand gestures and be aware of voice tone and volume because good speakers use their gestures and voice to communicate the size, speed, and importance of phenomena being talked about; they change their voice as they talk about changes in the phenomena. Your mind can use this extra information to build associations for your memory.
Purpose: To build the kind of understanding and memory that come from personal experiences that are deeper than the level of words. We often understand something by feel, so treasure the demonstrations and experiences you have with the science.
so that it occurs just before the matching lecture (preferable) or just after it. A few hours or a day before or after will give you enough memory for the first one to influence your intake of the second one and they will associate it. Long delays between lecture and text will lead to fading of memories so that they will not associate and thus you will not build as strong understanding or memories.
Purpose: To prevent the massive forgetting that will occur without notes. People who take good notes and use them can reconstruct a large amount of a lecture, even if they delay reviewing the notes for several days or weeks.