If you are motivated to learn you can learn. You are motivated if you approach your study materials with the idea or set "I'm ready to learn this. I'm going to consciously try to understand and remember it.” Simply being exposed to a lecture or a textbook does not mean that you will understand or remember the material it contains. Everyone has had the experience of "listening" to a lecture and not really being with it or knowing what was said. Everyone has had the experience of having "read" a page or two of a book and not having the slightest idea of what the pages contained. When this happens you are aware that you were sitting in the lecture hall but you really weren't paying much attention to what was said. You are aware of your eyes going over line after line in the pages of your book but your mind isn't really on it.

However, if you were told at the beginning of the lecture "At the end of this hour's lecture you will be asked twenty questions to see how well you know and understand what is being covered. Your score on the twenty questions will affect your grade in this course," you might attend carefully to what was said in that lecture. Similarly, you would probably be motivated if your instructor were to say "During the next 35 minutes I would like all of you to take your texts out and read and study pages 100 to 110. When time is up I will ask you some questions about what you have read. Your answers will affect your grade in this course." These situations seldom if ever happen because the instructor doesn't test you after every lecture, nor does he have you read each assignment in class and take a test on it. He is satisfied with giving you only an occasional exam which covers only a sampling of the large amounts of information on which you could be tested.

The effective student, however, goes into every lecture with the set "I'm going to listen attentively and take useful notes so that I can answer any questions if his test does cover the ideas in this lecture." That same student will have a similar attentiveness when he reads each page of the assigned reading in his textbooks. He will ask himself questions about what he has read, questions about information which he may be expected to know in the next test in that course. He knows that he has to pass the tests to pass the course and eventually graduate. The goal of graduating and getting an interesting and useful job is always with him and motivates him to study even some dull and miserable required courses. Not only is he motivated to learn, but he also has the right set to learn. His set is simply "I may be quizzed on anything I hear in the lecture and everything I read in the readings, so I'm going to pay close attention when I listen or read.” He wants to learn because he has a clear but simple reason for learning (to pass and eventually graduate). He has a plan. It is simply to listen and read attentively, asking himself questions which will help him pass the next quiz.

What Overlearning is and How You Can Do It

If you have learned material well enough to recall it with no errors one time, you have started to learn it. However, don’t stop with one perfect recitation. Continue to recite it several more times until it is well ingrained in your memory. This practice of going beyond one perfect recital is called overlearning. This overlearning or repeating your no-error recitation several times after your first recital should be practiced with everything you learn. Practicing it while you are "hot" tends to improve your retention of the learned material and enables you to spend less time reviewing that material later. A good rule of thumb is that if it's worth learning at all, it's worth overlearning.

How You Can Get Off a Plateau of Learning

A plateau is a leveling off of your learning. You are working away at some material to be learned and find yourself repeating the material and asking yourself questions about it and reciting and still not making much headway. When this happens, leave that material for awhile, take a break and then study something else for the next hour. Later come back to the tough material and see if you can further subdivide it to make it easier to learn. Then also break up the time that you spend on it. Study it for four half-hour periods separated by other studies rather than plowing through it for two solid hours. Plowing will lead to boredom, fatigue and frustration and will not get you off the plateau.

How Immediate Feedback of Knowing How You Did Helps You to Learn

By asking yourself what you have read and then either reciting out loud or whispering or mentally saying to yourself the main ideas you have just read, you are giving yourself immediate feedback about what you have learned. Recitation also enables you to make immediate corrections and avoid any mislearning. If you find that you are a little unsure of how to describe what you have just read, all you have to do is reread it and correct any errors you might have made the first time you tried to put it in your own words. This immediate correction is very useful for accurate learning.

Drilling or practicing also gives you immediate feedback. You ask yourself the meaning of the word on one side of the card and then try to state that meaning before flipping the card over and seeing whether or not you are right. If you are wrong you can correct yourself immediately and try a few more times until you get it just right.

Why Review is So Important to You in Learning

Immediate review of lecture notes and underlined textbooks and reading notes is crucial to prevent forgetting. Immediate review tends to set the ideas in your memory. If you wait even two days, you will find that you have forgotten much of the information and many of the ideas, and you will then have to relearn them. To prevent this waste of time in relearning, use immediate review and recitation to set the material firmly in your mind. The best time to review is immediately at the end of the lecture or immediately after reading and underlining an assignment. If you can’t do it immediately, make sure that you do it before the day is done, especially before you have another lecture in that course or read another assignment.

Studies have shown that we tend to forget much of the lecture materials or reading assignment materials the first day after we learn them unless we review these materials right away. One quick review will keep the material in your memory bank only temporarily. In order to keep the material at your mental fingertips, it's necessary to have frequent reviews carefully divided up or spaced. You will be able to retain the things you have learned if you divide your recitation and review sessions into about three sessions per week in each of your courses as you go through the semester. Then, about once a month, go back and review all of your underlined notes and underlined readings and use the recitation method on all of it up to that time. For example, at the end of the first month you should review all of the material you have covered that month. This may include from 30-60 pages of underlined lecture notes and possibly 200 pages of underlined text material for just one course. Because you have already spent three review periods a week reviewing each week's new material, the month’s cumulative review will be easier and more beneficial.

As you begin the second month's work, repeat the three times a week review of the new material for each week. At the end of the second month go back and recite and review all of the material for the second month. Then go back and recite and review the material which you covered during the first month. By this time you may be nearing your mid-term exams and can begin getting ready to memorize patterns of information from your reviewed notes for the tests. Immediate and continuing review will keep the material fresh in your memory.

How Repetition Can Be Useful to You

Repetition without thinking about what you are doing is meaningless and a waste of time. Repetition is useful once you have associated the thing to be learned with something meaningful or some idea that helps you to recall it. To make repetition effective, it's necessary to be "set" to learn the material and not have any other competing ideas with the learning of the moment. When you repeatedly ask yourself questions about your reading or lecture materials and repeatedly recite, checking back to the material to avoid any errors, you are using repetition very effectively.

How You Can Use Short Spaced Learning Chunks

Another bad pattern of learning which leads to unproductive "plowing through" material is procrastinating on very difficult assignments until you find yourself forty or fifty pages  behind on these assignments. The pattern goes like this: Chemistry is difficult. You don't understand it so you put off studying it all week until the weekend. Then you put aside five hours on Saturday and reserve it just for those fifty pages of chemistry. The usual thing that happens come Saturday is that you start your five-hour stint and soon become fatigued and disinterested and find that it’s almost impossible to read the fifty pages with much understanding. If you plow forward page after dull page, even using recitation will become fatiguing for you. Long before the five hours is over, you will feel exhausted and frustrated and most likely will learn very little of the fifty pages. This pattern is the worst possible way to learn a subject which you dislike or are having trouble understanding. A rule to remember is that the tougher the material, the shorter and more spaced your learning periods should be. With the chemistry material, it would be much easier to learn if you were to divide the fifty pages into ten five-page sections and spend ten one-half hour learning periods spread out during the week, reading and reciting five pages during each half hour period. Break up your assignments and time into smaller chunks and you will usually learn the material more readily. This spaced learning also applies to other materials besides your reading assignments. For example, if you have twelve formulas to learn in one week, it's much easier to spend fifteen minutes on each formula with an hour or two or more break between each fifteen minutes' formula learning period than to try to learn all twelve formulae in a single marathon three-hour study session. 
A good way to learn the formulae is to put them all on flash cards and learn three a day: one in the morning for fifteen minutes of self-questioning and reciting, one around midday for fifteen minutes and one at night for fifteen minutes. Then spend a few minutes reviewing all three of them at the end of the day. In four days you will have learned all twelve of them well.

The particular way you break up or space your practice and learning periods will depend somewhat on your interest in the difficulty level of that material. If it's vivid and fascinating material you may profitably spend a large block of learning time on it with little or no fatigue or boredom. However, the rule of thumb for easier and more effective learning of difficult and uninteresting material is divide it and conquer it.

How You Can Overcome Complex Material

Spaced learning of smaller chunks of material also applies to complicated processes. For example, what do you do if you are confronted with having to learn twenty complicated steps of an involved chemical analysis? First, get an overview of the entire process. Try to mentally picture the process taking place as you read about it. Try to clearly see what each step means as you go through the entire process. Next, look for some logical places to break the twenty steps up into subgroups. After looking over the twenty steps you may decide that the first four hold together as a sort of set up phase. The next five steps are really the initial first steps of the analysis itself. The next six after that might be thought of as the body of the analysis. The last five steps might be thought of as the completion phase of the analysis.

Now that you have grouped them you can begin to overlearn and rnemorize each of the subgroups. Remember to divide or space your questioning and recitation practice sessions so that no one session is more than an hour in length. The first half-hour to an hour you can work in the four set up steps. When you can repeat them without error three times in a row, take a short break and then go on to the next five "initial phase" steps in the process. Take another ten-minute break and then study some other subject for an hour. Then come back to the twenty stops and review to see if you can remember the first nine steps. If you can, then go on to the next six steps or the body of the analysis. Repeatedly question yourself and read those six until you can repeat them accurately three or four tirades in a row. Then go back to the first nine steps and see if you can go through all of the nine plus the six, three or four times with no errors. When you are able to do this, take another break and then study something else for the rest of that evening. Just before going to bed, slowly and carefully review the first fifteen steps you have learned in the chemical analysis process. Don't push yourself for perfection - simply review the fifteen steps before going to sleep.

Next morning again review the fifteen steps over breakfast. Later in the day set aside a half hour to review the fifteen steps again. Then take the last five steps by themselves and question and recite them until you can repeat them three or four times in a row with no errors. Then take a break. Come back to it again and this time try all twenty steps until you have recited them accurately three times in a row. You will learn them much more easily this way, using the spaced time and spaced materials (subgrouping) approach.

When to Use Whole or Part Memorization

Is it best to memorize an entire speech at one time, starting at the beginning and going through the whole thing without stopping, using the mental picture of the sequence of ideas in the speech as your guide? It depends! If it's short and easy you can probably handle the entire thing at once. However, if it is long, new to you, and has complicated concepts which are difficult to get a mental picture of in sequence, you had better break it up into sub-parts. Then memorize them separately in sequence and concentrate on the transition points so that when you are through, the ideas at the end of sub-part one flow easily into the ideas at the beginning of sub-part two, etc.

How Does the Whole-Part Question Apply to Other Subjects?

Some music students do go through a whole new piece of music from start to finish several times and team it. However, even they will tend to practice the difficult sub-parts or sections repeatedly until they have mastered them. Some drama students feel that they can best memorize a play by reading it repeatedly (and frequently aloud) from beginning to end several times. If each person's part in the dialogue is relatively short and simple and the action and change of scenes is clear and vividly imagined, they can memorize the play by using the whole method but augmenting it by having frequent rehearsals of key (sub-parts) scenes. Even most whole learning that does take pace also uses sub-part learning to make it easier to remember certain key difficult sub-sections.

One way for you to decide whether you are going to use the whole or part method or a combination of the two is to practice memorizing the material with the whole, part or combination methods and see what works best for you. Remember, if it's simple and clear and short or if you already know many of the component parts, then use the whole method, switching to the part method just to help you over the really tough parts. However, when you encounter long, complicated and difficult material, get an overview of it and its overall meaning and then break it up into more manageable sub-parts before you begin memorizing. Much college material is new, complicated, long and difficult so that the whole learning pattern doesn't help us much. Therefore, the general rule for the great majority of the material you will be learning in college is to break the big hunks into manageable sub-parts and use the part method of learning.

Why Rewarding Yourself During Study Breaks Is Important

The ten-minute break you should take after each fifty-minute time of study does several things to aid your learning. It's something like a reward for the effort you have put in it. If you take an active break you are actually stimulating better circulation of your blood to your brain. You are giving yourself a few minutes to refresh and to change your thinking to a new subject. Changing topics of study about every hour or so tends to keep your interest up and prevents you from getting terribly bored. A break helps your learning by giving your brain a recharge and the challenge of a new topic. Be sure to make the ten-minute break a part of your everyday pattern of study and learning.

Some students find that they are more motivated to study by giving themselves a "reward" during their ten-minute break. The reward you give yourself will depend on what you like to do. One student will strum his guitar during the break, another will eat a snack, a third will listen to his favorite recording artist, a fourth will breeze through a magazine or talk with a buddy. If you limit it to about ten minutes, the reward system gives you a feeling of having successfully completed almost an hour of study. It gives you a fresh outlook and gets you ready for the next hour's work.

Why You Learn Better Before and After Sleep

Learning before going to sleep can be quite effective if you are not already too fatigued from a busy day. Reviewing notes and underlined materials can be very effective for the last hour before you shut off your light and hit the sack. Another review of the same material as soon as you are fully awake the next morning can help you to remember the details of the material much better than you would if you spent the same amount of time reviewing those materials during your daytime working hours. Pre-sleep and post-sleep learning can be very effective. However, it appears that very little useful learning takes place during sleep, so don't waste your time with your tape recorder going near your pillow all night. If you are really deeply asleep you probably will not comprehend and retain what is being said.

The learning you accomplish before and after sleep is better remembered than daytime learning because there is less interference of new ideas and new stimuli when you are asleep than when you are awake.

What the Difference Is Between Learning and Memorizing

You could memorize the words to a song in a foreign language and still not know what it means. You may accurately memorize the spelling and pronunciation of new words in any of your textbooks and not know what they mean. You can accurately memorize a sequential list of thirty different terms and write them out correctly when asked to do so and still have no idea as to their meaning. In order to learn, however, you have to continually ask yourself questions and try to find out answers to those questions. You have to ask: What is the relationship between these words, ideas or concepts? In what ways are they similar or different? What functions or uses do they have both in class and out? How can I apply them? What significance does their order have? Are some more general or more specific than others? Can I think of some simple examples which would clear up what they mean? How do they relate to other words, ideas, and concepts which I have already learned in this course or other courses I am taking? Can I mentally picture the processes which are described with these words? What evidence can I find to support or reject these ideas?

When you find yourself routinely asking your questions like these and finding answers, you will have gone that step beyond memorization to learning. Memorization is usually necessary in learning. When you memorize and think and see relationships and meanings at the same time, then you are learning.