Study Tip #5
BASIC MEMORIZING--THREE "LOOK-AWAY" METHODS

Outline of "look-away" methods

Why "look-away" methods work so well.

Method #1. Easy studying while reading: Read a passage, look away, make a summary, reread, and check your summary.
Method #2. Serious studying: Teach and test yourself.
Method #3. Serious studying. Build sets of newly learned facts one-by-one. (Variant of Method #2.)

Why "look-away" methods work so well.

Students are using look-away methods when they read information and then look away from their book or flash card and try to say it to themselves without looking at the book or card. These are effective methods of studying, and many students use them.

The core goal of studying to build memory is to build strong associations among new and old chunks of information. When people must learn many new things, they face dangers of overloading their short-term memories and of later confusing various similar bits of information with each other. Look-away fight both of these dangers while building associations that you can check as you learn. They also give you actual practice recalling your new knowledge and give you definite feedback as to how well you are learning. They save time because you recall information that was just recently entered into your working memory. Since you build associations so quickly and review so quickly, it means you don't have to waste time rereading and relearning forgotten material.

Method #1. While reading do easy studying. Read a passage, look away, make a summary, reread, check the summary and move on.

Use this method when time is limited and you expect you will not read a passage twice. What material would you use it on? Use it on a wide variety of non-fiction in which you learn theories, descriptions, explanations, steps in doing a skill, and arguments for this or that claim. However, it will not work as well as the other two methods on new vocabulary, technical terms, numbers, formulas, and very detailed precise information. It will definitely build more memory for that kind of information than ordinary reading will.

Do this technique right while you are reading, even reading a book for the first time. Do not set the goal of perfection of remembering the main points. Your only goal is try for a summary and to check it and notice what you got and what you missed. Then you read onward even though you haven’t summarize perfectly. Later, after you have completely read the material, when you want to study for memory, you will try for more perfection.

First, read a passage. Choose enough to cover several ideas or facts, but not so much that you can't recall a lot of it. Read perhaps a half-page, maybe one, maybe two. If you are working with a dense two-column textbook, make it shorter.

Second, look away. Try to summarize the key points. Summarize the main ideas, key facts, line of argument, or the events that happened. Adjust your summary to the nature of the book or article. Try to talk to yourself in words, and if the passage contained graphics try to visualize them and recall the main points of the visual material.

Third, go back to the beginning of the passage and read it again very rapidly and look for what the key points really are. Don't read too slowly. Neither should you read so fast you can't extract the key points. Search for the key points, both the ones you summarized and the other ones in the book that you missed.

Fourth, as you pick out the key points from the passage, consciously check whether you had put them into your mental summary. Had you remembered each point? If you had remembered a point, let yourself feel good. If you had forgotten it, let yourself feel the emotions that go with making a minor mistake. Do not ignore your emotions. Feel them.

Fifth, move on to the next passage even though you don't remember it perfectly. You move on because you are primarily reading, not studying.

Summarizing helps you in a different way than reading does. 

When you summarize ideas in your mind, you group ideas together and make associations. That's different than what you do when you do straight reading. When you read in ordinary ways, you encounter the ideas separately, one at a time, and if you keep reading on, they often stay separated. Our minds cannot remember separated ideas as well as ideas that we have associated together. So you can help link ideas together by summarizing them.

This summarizing method also uses the natural power of your working memory. Our working memory can remember several new bits of information for a short period of time. After that they fade out. If you choose passages that are short enough and if you review immediately, you will remember many of the ideas even when looking away. That saves time.

Also when you try to summarize right then, you are recalling information out of memory, which is exactly what you need to do to build memory. You cause learning both when you put ideas into memory and when you practice pulling the ideas out of memory. Modern brain imaging research shows that the brain emphasizes the left frontal lobe for the input of information and the right frontal lobe for recalling information. It is important to recall information at least once in order to make it accessible later. Of course, many practice attempts work even better for building durable memory. But if you cannot recall something even once when it is recent and fresh in mind, how can you expect to re-call it when it has gone cold?

Finally, when you compare your mental summary to what's in the book by quickly rereading, you will detect what you did right and did wrong. You help memory by detecting a mistake and correcting it. When you discover you omitted an idea, your natural feeling bad will add an emotional zing which also associates to the new information and increases memory. You will notice what's right and remember it. This works the way it works after an exam and people later discuss it with someone and discover they made a mistake. Once they learn the right answer, they almost never make that mistake again. This reading technique of checking your summary against the contents of the passage will let you learn by making a mistake and correcting it. And when you discover a success, your natural positive feelings will reinforce your learning and increase memory. 

Method #2. Serious studying: Teach yourself and test yourself. 

Use this method when you find specific facts or ideas that you want to remember. You will need to have a way to see your questions but not see the answer in a book or piece of paper. Use flash cards or cover the answer with your hand while being able to look at the question.

1. Read the fact carefully so that you understand it and it is meaningful to you. Do not try to memorize it until you know it accurately.
2. Then stop reading, think of one or more logical questions to which this idea is an answer, and do the next 5 steps (steps 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7).
3. Look away from your book.
4. On your first try, ask yourself the question as soon as your eyes are off the book.
5. Ask yourself the question.
6. Say the answer to yourself clearly.
7. Check the book and compare what you said to what the real information is.
8. Repeat steps 3, 4, 5, and 6 until you get the fact right several times.
9. On later tries as you have begun to learn the fact, make a time gap between looking at the book and asking your question.

Distract yourself for 5 to 10 seconds. After you are quite good, make longer gaps by practicing something else. Even wait overnight before testing yourself again for an even better self-test.
Notice the key steps: You link the information to a question, you distract yourself for a few seconds, you actively recite the answer, and you compare your answer to the right answer. These ingredients are essential.
The purpose for asking a question first is to link your fact to the question and build an association between questions and answers. That makes your practice match what you do in a test in which you will also see questions and recall answers.

The purpose for distracting yourself is to let the idea fade a bit from your memory. You are forced to recall it when memory "is cold" as in real life. That strengthens memory.

The purpose for you actively reciting the answer is give you practice in stating the fact or idea and to let you know in truth whether you learned it. Reciting leaves nothing to chance.

Finally, when you compare what you said to what the book says, you get feedback. You will feel good when you get it right. You will feel bad when you get it wrong and you will now notice what the right answer is with some emotion. Your memory grows.

Method #3. Serious studying: Build sets of newly learned facts one-by-one. Expanding Method #2.

Use this technique when you have a set of chunks of information to learn: a vocabulary list, many facts from a science chapter, lists of principles, etc. You can successfully study many related pieces of information by adding them one-by-one into sets of facts. 

• Use it for new words, symbols, facts, formulas.
• Use it when you learn bits of information that you might get confused. 
• Besides building and testing the strength of your new associations, this method also helps you to discriminate among related concepts.

Follow these steps.

1. Learn one fact. Use either the method described above or any other method that works. Test yourself.
2. Learn a second fact. Test yourself.
3. Now test yourself on the first fact again. When you've got it, test yourself on the second fact again. Go back and forth between the first and second facts until you understand their differences and know them both.
4. Now learn a third fact and test it.
5. Return to the first two facts and test yourself on them. Check the third fact. Keep working with all three facts until you know them all.
6. Now add a fourth fact. Learn it and integrate it into the set of four facts.
7. Keep adding facts, one at a time, to the growing set of facts. When you reach 10 to 15 facts or come to the end of a logical group, start again with a new set.
8. After learning a set, check your knowledge of it by starting now with the last item in the set and then working forward. Why? The last items in the set get less practice than the early items, so they need special attention to make sure they are learned.

This method works well. One psychologist told his teenage son about the method, and the boy immediately used it to study German vocabulary words. He told his father that he learned his words faster than ever before and could remember all of them for the first time.

Do not study many facts separately before you study the first ones again. That has bad results, because you will take a long time going through your list, and the long time leads to forgetting them before you get back to them. You will waste time relearning them.

Note: Many students use sets of flash cards poorly. They look at one flash card, then the next, and the next and so on until they’ve looked at all of the set. Then they start in again. They find they have to keep looking at the answer side because they never learned the information the first time. By using the method of building up sets, you can learn them thoroughly.

(Dan Hodges. 7/07)

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