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For example, you may skip a reading before class because the professor covers the same material in class; doing so misses a key opportunity to learn in different modes (reading and listening) and to benefit from the repetition and distributed practice (see #3 below) that you’ll get from both reading ahead and attending class. Reading 101: A Guide to Teaching Reading and Writing Reading 101 is a self-paced professional development course for K-3 teachers, developed by Reading Rockets. The program provides teachers with an in-depth knowledge of reading and writing so they are prepared to guide their students into becoming skilled and enthusiastic readers and writers.

Sometimes it feels impossible to remember everything thrown at you during college.

Between the major battles of the Crimean War, partial derivatives, and the life cycle of the western gymnosperm, how do you keep it all in your head?

But it turns out that with the right tools, you can drastically improve your ability to learn and retain the mountains of information necessary to succeed both in college and beyond.

So read on and I’ll teach you 27 awesome memory hacks that will help you achieve this!

1. Your Brain 101

The human brain is an efficient organ, and sometimes we don’t keep information that we later wish we had. Our minds are full of memories and information accumulated over a lifetime, and we have basically two types of memory to help organize all this stuff:

1. a) Short-term memory = things we’re doing right now; very sharp!
2. b) Long-term memory = things we’ve done in the past; much duller.

The goal here is to better encode information into your long-term memory so that it’ll be available later for, say, a pop quiz or test. I’ll talk about specific techniques to help you do this coming up.

2. Set the Scene

Start off with choosing a study spot where your focus can rest fully on the task at hand to help with the encoding of memory. Even if you think you’re a multi-tasking ninja, your conscious mind can only focus on one thing at a time. So eliminate any distractions.

A quiet room with good lighting is best for reading. In a classroom, the ideal scenario is taking notes with pen and paper. Or if you’re a laptop note taker, at least shut off any notifications from popping up to remind you that you’ve gone fifteen minutes without checking Facebook!

Look:

Failing to prepare yourself to learn will render most of the following tricks and tips useless. We know life isn’t perfect, and you can’t always have the ideal setting available for studying. But with a little advance planning, it’s absolutely doable.

3. Be Present

If you can restate what you’ve heard in a lecture in your own words, your chances of remembering later are much higher than if you listen passively. This is called “attending,” and there are many ways to do it: writing notes during a lecture instead of just listening, or in a one-on-one session with your prof saying “This is what I think you said…” and then putting it in your own words. Just be sure that your laptop and other distractions are put away to enable you to focus solely on the task at hand.

4. Keep Calm and Study On

Stress decreases your ability to encode and retrieve memories. My guess is that if you’re reading this article, then that’s the last thing you want to do! This stress impact can be reduced with meditation, focused breathing, or even yoga. Anything you do to relax and reduce stress can and likely will help your memory.

5. Go to Bed

Yes, your mom was right. Those all-nighters are doing you more harm than good. While you may think the extra hours of studying will get you the grade you want, studies have proven that sleep is vital for memory. One such study completed by Rasch and Born demonstrated the importance of REM sleep—the deepest stage in the sleep cycle—in stabilizing memories. Getting enough sleep every night and maintaining as regular a sleep and wake time as possible will go miles toward a better memory.

6. Exercise

A good workout won’t just help your memory, but it may reduce stress and help you sleep. Triple whammy! This doesn’t mean you need to spend an hour on the treadmill every day. Simply electing to take the stairs instead of the elevator or walking the three blocks to your favorite coffee shop instead of taking the bus can make a difference.

7. Outsource Your Brain

Know a great way to help your memory? Stop relying on your brain to remember every little detail. In the age of calendar apps, let your phone remember that dentist appointment. You focus on the power rule for your calculus exam.

8. Focus on the Learning Process

Let’s face it: Nothing can replace the time you put in effectively studying and learning new material. Studying early and often will always beat last-minute cramming.

But inevitably with all the things competing for your time in college, you’ll find yourself the night before a test wondering how you’re ever going to get all that information in your head. That’s why I’m going to focus the rest of the tips on some specific techniques that can be real life savers for speeding up the memorization process.

9. Acronyms

You’ve likely heard of PEMDAS, the acronym that helped us all to memorize the order of operations in elementary school. By remembering this made-up word, you can recall the sequence of words that align with each letter: Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, and Subtraction. Try making up your own acronyms as easy shortcuts to memorizing everything from historical events to chemical processes.

10. Acrostics

Similarly, acrostics are words comprised of the first letters of other words. But typically you use them to join longer phrases or concepts. For a simple example, if you’re studying the Gettysburg Address, you might make an acrostic that looks like this:

Abraham Lincoln delivered it on November 19, 1863

Because he wanted to honor Union soldiers who had fallen at the Battle of Gettsyburg

Equality, freedom, and democracy were its main themes

11. Create Connections and Associations

Connecting something you know to a new concept you’re trying to learn can help fix that new concept in your memory. For example, knowing that gravity causes things to move faster and faster toward the Earth when dropped, you may associate acceleration with gravity. Acceleration is like gravity but can be in any direction.

12. Repetition (Listening)

We all memorize through repetition when we listen to our favorite song a hundred times and suddenly realize we know every word. In the same way, when you listen to a definition you’re trying to memorize as either you or a friend repeat it over and over, then you’ll remember it more quickly.

13. Repetition (Doing)

This method is common with musicians and athletes. Perhaps a violinist can’t seem to memorize a few measures of music; she might repeat the same notes until her fingers seem to play the notes on their own.

14. Repetition (Reading)

If you want to remember the order of a story for a presentation, it may help to read its summary several times. When you reach the point of knowing what’s about to happen before you read it, then you know you’ve memorized the order of events.

15. Repetition (Writing)

When it comes to things like new terms and spelling differences, sometimes writing and re-writing something until it becomes second nature can help you to memorize it.

16. Rhyme-Keys

This method typically is used with a list in which order is important. You first link each number to a word that rhymes with it. For example, number one could be “sun”, and two could be “blue”. To keep two things in order, you might tell a story with these rhyme-keys. If butter is first and cheese is second, then you could tell the following little story to remember: “The butter melts in the sun with the blue cheese.”

17. Visualize

Engage as many senses as you can. Maybe you want to remember a battle for your European history class. Close your eyes and think about the sequence of events. What happened first? Imagine it. Imagine the sound the boats made as they raced toward the shore. What happened second? Imagine the sound of the cannons as they were fired. What happened third? Smell the smoke of a fire. Engage as many of your senses as you can. When you recall that first event, go through the same process until you’ve memorized it.

18. Story Lines

Engage the narrative part of your brain. Create a story or dramatize one you already know. Maybe you need to remember a chemical reaction. Give the carbon and hydrogen a story! For example, tell the story of their breakup and new relationships. By making these mundane things into characters, you give yourself new things to remember about them—and maybe have a little fun doing it too. This method has saved students when they had to remember dozens of physics formulas!

19. Chunking

Our working, or short-term, memories can only retain five to nine pieces of information at a time. To make the best use of this memory limitation, we can remember the same number of chunks of information instead. For example, as opposed to thinking of each digit of a phone number individually, we tend to think of them in groups. This turns a 10-digit number into three chunks, helping us to memorize it. This idea would help us remember eight numbers by thinking of them as two years. For example, 18421963 becomes 1842 and 1963 as opposed to 1-8-4-2-1-9-6-3. See how that works? Chunking is effective for short-term memorization.

20. Scent

Yes, you read that right. Studies such as one conducted by Anne-Lise Saive, Jean-Pierre Royet, and Jane Plailly have shown that smells can evoke memories. These memories are typically more likely to be sensations or situations rather than specific facts (episodic memory). So, if you were to always chew mint gum in your biology class, while it may not help you directly to remember the chemical formula for glucose, it will evoke the memory of being in that classroom, which may in turn help you recall that formula.

21. Method of Loci

This method is also known as the “mind palace.” Imagine you’re walking through your very own castle. You greet George Washington as you step into the foyer, and you greet Barack Obama as you step out of the back door after meeting each of the presidents in various locations in between. You remember the order of the rooms you walked through, and by mentally placing the presidents in those rooms by chronological order, you’ll visualize your way into an A on that presidential history quiz.

22. Image-Name Associations

That girl who lives down the hall—maybe it’s Bess? You know you won’t remember her name alone, but you notice she has hair so long you wonder how she buttons her jeans. You now think of her as “Bess whose hair’s a mess,” and now you’ve associated a defining feature with her name, which will help you remember it. This could work in other situations as well, say, for a historical figure or world leaders on a political science test.

23. Chaining

When you have a series or “chain” of things to memorize, you can utilize your visual memory despite having verbal ideas to remember. To do this, you can make up a story as silly or as realistic as you want to chain the unrelated ideas together. For example, three monkeys made a point of going in one roller coaster cart for four different rides. One of these rides was so busy they had five monkeys in one cart. This silly story helps you remember that the first several digits of pi are 3.1415 by chaining the numbers together.

24. Time It Right

If you study before bed, your brain is better able to process that complicated information during sleep. Just know that this relies on you actually getting enough sleep to allow your brain to do its work.

25. Attach Emotion

We often remember embarrassing or negative emotions more so than positive ones. So we remember those things we first got wrong in a study group more than the things we could teach others. If you make a mistake in a math technique, the frustration may cause you to remember that you must make the other choice next time. This won’t work for things like city names, but it will work if you know it’s an A or B situation.

26. Organize

If you organize a list of names you must remember in alphabetical order, you’ll more easily notice that you skipped a name if you’ve jumped from A names to C names without the name starting with B you wrote the night before.

27. Get Moving

Walking or other gentle exercise allows us to occupy the part of our brain that is idle during resting study. Because we can walk without conscious thought, we let our conscious mind focus more fully on the issue at hand.

At the end of the day, no memorization technique can replace strong study habits. However, if you need a memory boost before that final exam or peer review, these tools should do the trick!

Sources/For More Information:

Do you ever feel like your study habits simply aren’t cutting it? Do you wonder what you could be doing to perform better in class and on exams? Many students realize that their high school study habits aren’t very effective in college. This is understandable, as college is quite different from high school. The professors are less personally involved, classes are bigger, exams are worth more, reading is more intense, and classes are much more rigorous. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you; it just means you need to learn some more effective study skills. Fortunately, there are many active, effective study strategies that are shown to be effective in college classes.

This handout offers several tips on effective studying. Implementing these tips into your regular study routine will help you to efficiently and effectively learn course material. Experiment with them and find some that work for you.

Reading is not studying

Simply reading and re-reading texts or notes is not actively engaging in the material. It is simply re-reading your notes. Only ‘doing’ the readings for class is not studying. It is simply doing the reading for class. Re-reading leads to quick forgetting.

Think of reading as an important part of pre-studying, but learning information requires actively engaging in the material (Edwards, 2014). Active engagement is the process of constructing meaning from text that involves making connections to lectures, forming examples, and regulating your own learning (Davis, 2007). Active studying does not mean highlighting or underlining text, re-reading, or rote memorization. Though these activities may help to keep you engaged in the task, they are not considered active studying techniques and are weakly related to improved learning (Mackenzie, 1994).

Ideas for active studying include:

• Create a study guide by topic. Formulate questions and problems and write complete answers. Create your own quiz.
• Become a teacher. Say the information aloud in your own words as if you are the instructor and teaching the concepts to a class.
• Derive examples that relate to your own experiences.
• Create concept maps or diagrams that explain the material.
• Develop symbols that represent concepts.
• For non-technical classes (e.g., English, History, Psychology), figure out the big ideas so you can explain, contrast, and re-evaluate them.
• For technical classes, work the problems and explain the steps and why they work.
• Study in terms of question, evidence, and conclusion: What is the question posed by the instructor/author? What is the evidence that they present? What is the conclusion?

Organization and planning will help you to actively study for your courses. When studying for a test, organize your materials first and then begin your active reviewing by topic (Newport, 2007). Often professors provide subtopics on the syllabi. Use them as a guide to help organize your materials. For example, gather all of the materials for one topic (e.g., PowerPoint notes, text book notes, articles, homework, etc.) and put them together in a pile. Label each pile with the topic and study by topics.

For more information on the principle behind active studying, check out our tipsheet on metacognition.

Understand the Study Cycle

The Study Cycle, developed by Frank Christ, breaks down the different parts of studying: previewing, attending class, reviewing, studying, and checking your understanding. Although each step may seem obvious at a glance, all too often students try to take shortcuts and miss opportunities for good learning. For example, you may skip a reading before class because the professor covers the same material in class; doing so misses a key opportunity to learn in different modes (reading and listening) and to benefit from the repetition and distributed practice (see #3 below) that you’ll get from both reading ahead and attending class. Understanding the importance of all stages of this cycle will help make sure you don’t miss opportunities to learn effectively.

Spacing out is good

One of the most impactful learning strategies is “distributed practice”—spacing out your studying over several short periods of time over several days and weeks (Newport, 2007). The most effective practice is to work a short time on each class every day. The total amount of time spent studying will be the same (or less) than one or two marathon library sessions, but you will learn the information more deeply and retain much more for the long term—which will help get you an A on the final. The important thing is how you use your study time, not how long you study. Long study sessions lead to a lack of concentration and thus a lack of learning and retention.

In order to spread out studying over short periods of time across several days and weeks, you need control over your schedule. Keeping a list of tasks to complete on a daily basis will help you to include regular active studying sessions for each class. Try to do something for each class each day. Be specific and realistic regarding how long you plan to spend on each task—you should not have more tasks on your list than you can reasonably complete during the day.

For example, you may do a few problems per day in math rather than all of them the hour before class. In history, you can spend 15-20 minutes each day actively studying your class notes. Thus, your studying time may still be the same length, but rather than only preparing for one class, you will be preparing for all of your classes in short stretches. This will help focus, stay on top of your work, and retain information.

In addition to learning the material more deeply, spacing out your work helps stave off procrastination. Rather than having to face the dreaded project for four hours on Monday, you can face the dreaded project for 30 minutes each day. The shorter, more consistent time to work on a dreaded project is likely to be more acceptable and less likely to be delayed to the last minute. Finally, if you have to memorize material for class (names, dates, formulas), it is best to make flashcards for this material and review periodically throughout the day rather than one long, memorization session (Wissman and Rawson, 2012).

It’s good to be intense

Not all studying is equal. You will accomplish more if you study intensively. Intensive study sessions are short and will allow you to get work done with minimal wasted effort. Shorter, intensive study times are more effective than drawn out studying.

In fact, one of the most impactful study strategies is distributing studying over multiple sessions (Newport, 2007). Intensive study sessions can last 30 or 45-minute sessions and include active studying strategies. For example, self-testing is an active study strategy that improves the intensity of studying and efficiency of learning. However, planning to spend hours on end self-testing is likely to cause you to become distracted and lose your attention.

On the other hand, if you plan to quiz yourself on the course material for 45 minutes and then take a break, you are much more likely to maintain your attention and retain the information. Furthermore, the shorter, more intense sessions will likely put the pressure on that is needed to prevent procrastination.

Silence isn’t golden

Know where you study best. The silence of a library may not be the best place for you. It’s important to consider what noise environment works best for you. You might find that you concentrate better with some background noise. Some people find that listening to classical music while studying helps them concentrate, while others find this highly distracting. The point is that the silence of the library may be just as distracting (or more) than the noise of a gymnasium. Thus, if silence is distracting, but you prefer to study in the library, try the first or second floors where there is more background ‘buzz.’

Keep in mind that active studying is rarely silent as it often requires saying the material aloud.

Problems are your friend

Working and re-working problems is important for technical courses (e.g., math, economics). Be able to explain the steps of the problems and why they work.

In technical courses, it is usually more important to work problems than read the text (Newport, 2007). In class, write down in detail the practice problems demonstrated by the professor. Annotate each step and ask questions if you are confused. At the very least, record the question and the answer (even if you miss the steps).

When preparing for tests, put together a large list of problems from the course materials and lectures. Work the problems and explain the steps and why they work (Carrier, 2003).

Reconsider multitasking

A significant amount of research indicates that multi-tasking does not improve efficiency and actually negatively affects results (Junco, 2012).

In order to study smarter, not harder, you will need to eliminate distractions during your study sessions. Social media, web browsing, game playing, texting, etc. will severely affect the intensity of your study sessions if you allow them! Research is clear that multi-tasking (e.g., responding to texts, while studying), increases the amount of time needed to learn material and decreases the quality of the learning (Junco, 2012).

Eliminating the distractions will allow you to fully engage during your study sessions. If you don’t need your computer for homework, then don’t use it. Use apps to help you set limits on the amount of time you can spend at certain sites during the day. Turn your phone off. Reward intensive studying with a social-media break (but make sure you time your break!) See our handout on managing technology for more tips and strategies.

Switch up your setting

Find several places to study in and around campus and change up your space if you find that it is no longer a working space for you.

Know when and where you study best. It may be that your focus at 10:00 PM. is not as sharp as at 10:00 AM. Perhaps you are more productive at a coffee shop with background noise, or in the study lounge in your residence hall. Perhaps when you study on your bed, you fall asleep.

Have a variety of places in and around campus that are good study environments for you. That way wherever you are, you can find your perfect study spot. After a while, you might find that your spot is too comfortable and no longer is a good place to study, so it’s time to hop to a new spot!

Become a teacher

Try to explain the material in your own words, as if you are the teacher. You can do this in a study group, with a study partner, or on your own. Saying the material aloud will point out where you are confused and need more information and will help you retain the information. As you are explaining the material, use examples and make connections between concepts (just as a teacher does). It is okay (even encouraged) to do this with your notes in your hands. At first you may need to rely on your notes to explain the material, but eventually you’ll be able to teach it without your notes.

Creating a quiz for yourself will help you to think like your professor. What does your professor want you to know? Quizzing yourself is a highly effective study technique. Make a study guide and carry it with you so you can review the questions and answers periodically throughout the day and across several days. Identify the questions that you don’t know and quiz yourself on only those questions. Say your answers aloud. This will help you to retain the information and make corrections where they are needed. For technical courses, do the sample problems and explain how you got from the question to the answer. Re-do the problems that give you trouble. Learning the material in this way actively engages your brain and will significantly improve your memory (Craik, 1975).

Take control of your calendar

Controlling your schedule and your distractions will help you to accomplish your goals.
If you are in control of your calendar, you will be able to complete your assignments and stay on top of your coursework. The following are steps to getting control of your calendar:

1. On the same day each week, (perhaps Sunday nights or Saturday mornings) plan out your schedule for the week.
2. Go through each class and write down what you’d like to get completed for each class that week.
3. Look at your calendar and determine how many hours you have to complete your work.
4. Determine whether your list can be completed in the amount of time that you have available. (You may want to put the amount of time expected to complete each assignment.) Make adjustments as needed. For example, if you find that it will take more hours to complete your work than you have available, you will likely need to triage your readings. Completing all of the readings is a luxury. You will need to make decisions about your readings based on what is covered in class. You should read and take notes on all of the assignments from the favored class source (the one that is used a lot in the class). This may be the textbook or a reading that directly addresses the topic for the day. You can likely skim supplemental readings.
5. Pencil into your calendar when you plan to get assignments completed.
6. Before going to bed each night, make your plan for the next day. Waking up with a plan will make you more productive.

Use downtime to your advantage

Beware of ‘easy’ weeks. This is the calm before the storm. Lighter work weeks are a great time to get ahead on work or to start long projects. Use the extra hours to get ahead on assignments or start big projects or papers. You should plan to work on every class every week even if you don’t have anything due. In fact, it is preferable to do some work for each of your classes every day. Spending 30 minutes per class each day will add up to three hours per week, but spreading this time out over six days is more effective than cramming it all in during one long three-hour session. If you have completed all of the work for a particular class, then use the 30 minutes to get ahead or start a longer project.

Use all your resources

Remember that you can make an appointment with an academic coach to work on implementing any of the strategies suggested in this handout.

Works consulted

Carrier, L. M. (2003). College students’ choices of study strategies. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 96(1), 54-56.

Craik, F. I., & Tulving, E. (1975). Depth of processing and the retention of words in episodic memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 104(3), 268.

Davis, S. G., & Gray, E. S. (2007). Going beyond test-taking strategies: Building self-regulated students and teachers. Journal of Curriculum and Instruction, 1(1), 31-47.

Edwards, A. J., Weinstein, C. E., Goetz, E. T., & Alexander, P. A. (2014). Learning and study strategies: Issues in assessment, instruction, and evaluation. Elsevier.

Junco, R., & Cotten, S. R. (2012). No A 4 U: The relationship between multitasking and academic performance. Computers & Education, 59(2), 505-514.

Mackenzie, A. M. (1994). Examination preparation, anxiety and examination performance in a group of adult students. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 13(5), 373-388.

McGuire, S.Y. & McGuire, S. (2016). Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate in Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation. Stylus Publishing, LLC.

Before You Beginguided Reading 101 Dalmatians

Newport, C. (2006). How to become a straight-a student: the unconventional strategies real college students use to score high while studying less. Three Rivers Press.

Paul, K. (1996). Study smarter, not harder. Self Counsel Press.

Before You Beginguided Reading 101 Reading

Robinson, A. (1993). What smart students know: maximum grades, optimum learning, minimum time. Crown trade paperbacks.

Wissman, K. T., Rawson, K. A., & Pyc, M. A. (2012). How and when do students use flashcards? Memory, 20, 568-579.

Before You Beginguided Reading 101 Lesson

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