Strategies in learning

  1) Mental Imagery

Answer the following questions:

• ·         How many windows are in your house?
• ·         How many vowels are in the spelling of 100?

For answering the first questions, most people have imaged themselves as taking a mental tour of their house and counting the number of windows. And for answering the second question, people have mentally formed the image of the spelling of digit 100 and counted the number of vowels present in its spelling.

So, here mental imagery has helped you in answering these questions. Without the ability to produce mental images, you would have not answered it correctly. Studies have suggested that if you are capable of producing mental images of the information to be remembered, then, you can learn things more efficiently. It can be defined as one’s ability to visualise the situation or information mentally. Developmental studies have suggested that older students can get more benefits by using this method. Learning information using imagery involves two steps:

• 1)      Reading the information to be remembered.
• 2)      Mentally forming a picture of that information.

If the mental image contains all the relevant information, then, it will be more accurately learned. Further, reading from a book or source having a lot of details also help in forming images and thus improves learning.

 

2) Rehearsal

Rehearsing refers to repeating of information over and over again to order to learn it. Rehearsal can be two types: maintenance rehearsal and elaborative rehearsal. In maintenance rehearsal, information is simply repeated a number of times, without understanding the underlying meaning, to keep it in memory. On the other hand, elaborative rehearsal- is a method of learning information by making an attempt to elaborate it either by understanding its underlying meaning or by making meaningful connections with other information. Studies have suggested that learning a concept or information using elaborative rehearsal method is more effective, as it helps in retaining information for the longer period.

One way of doing elaborative rehearsal is elaborative interrogation-it involves asking why question for the information to be remembered and then generating an answer. Studies have suggested that this specific technique is useful in remembering facts.

 

3) Organisation

This strategy of learning requires re-organisation of information to be remembered in such a way that would facilitate the learning process. For example, you were asked to remember the following list:

Delhi

Ostrich

London

Ludhiana

Yak

Greenwich

Owl

You can either learn these items by making separate groups for city and animal names or you can create a new word by taking the first alphabet from each word, such as DOLLY-GO. This method helps in improving learning in two ways; (1) it reduces a large amount of information into the manageable amount, and (ii) it helps in retrieving information more accurately

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