By Mr Kwok

Achieving a powerful memory has always been striven for in education. Though not a direct learning objective in curricula, content retention can make or break a student’s grades.

To help students learn better, excellent teachers use a technique known as scaffolding and we are not talking about construction here. Scaffolding is the support given to a student during the learning process so that he can achieve his learning goals.

Some learning professionals also refer to scaffolding as the building of an idea on top of another idea. This is somewhat like why you go for your PSLE long before you attempt your ‘O’ Levels because you need all the knowledge and skills from P1-6 and S1-2 before having the capability to pick up whatever is dished to you in S3-4.

Interestingly, scaffolding can also be applied by you, the student, to specifically achieve a powerful memory in your own learning. Here are a few suggestions.

1. Connections

• The more connections you can build within your knowledge, the stronger you can remember them.
• Remember your teacher(s) asking you to create a mind map as a way to summarise your learning? Yup, this is one effective way to join up the bits and pieces you have learned.
• Notice that I emphasised “you” because these connections have to be made by you doing the thinking to be truly effective. You can’t take the shortcut of grabbing an off-the-book mind map and treat it as your own.
• For mind mapping, I prefer using the free online software, Coggle. Not only are you not limited by the size of a physical piece of paper, you can easily amend the positions, colours, font sizes of every element.
• Lastly, the more extensive your connections, the better your brain can remember. In other words, we encourage you to mind map your way to materials you have learned previously or information found in other subjects or even your own experience.

2. Metaphors & Analogies

• Abstract concepts like formulas are notoriously hard to memorise.
• Why not turn them into suitable metaphors/analogies? (Yes, this will need some brain juice on your part but that is the whole point of helping you remember. No effort, no returns.)
• For example, take Boyle’s Law in physical chemistry: PV=constant which relates pressure and volume. A simple visual metaphor is to imagine a fat balloon. If you try to squeeze it (increasing the pressure), it becomes smaller (decreasing the volume) so it becomes intuitive that pressure and volume are inversely related.
• Even for a non-abstract subject like literature, say the book “Animal Farm”, drawing out the main events into a timeline allows you to imagine the story in a visual order which tremendously help in remembering the book.

3. Stories

• This is my favourite.
• Weaving your contents into a story makes it too interesting for you to forget.
  
• Naturally, it takes some effort to come up with a good story so it should not be done for every bit of information you need to remember.
  
• Stories need not be true but if they are, the impact is so much stronger. Therefore if you can tie your learning to current or historical events, do so!
  
• I once taught about how a toxic chemical compound can be transmitted through the food chain. The story (seems like there is some truth to this “story” and Singapore was involved! 1, 2) I used for my students was what became known as “Operation Cat Drop“. (Read it in the link as it is a bit long to reproduce here.)

4. How’s and/or Why’s

• Inquisitiveness can go a long way.
• This method especially works well with physical and social sciences.
• Let’s say for History, you know that Singapore was founded by Raffles in 1819. Well and good. But do you know why (he wanted to open for the British East India Company an alternative trading port to the ones owned by the Dutch) and how (through subterfuge in backing one Malay prince against another for the throne)?
• In Biology, we know that butterflies are generally more colourful than moths. Again, why? Moths tend to be nocturnal so they do not need pretty colours to be seen by potential mates.
• By answering the how’s and why’s, you can gain a broader and deeper (and probably more interesting) perspective of the topic – all helpful in content retention.

Have fun with applying connections, metaphors, stories and how’s/why’s in your studies. Not only does it take the boredom out of studying, it actually adds meaning to what you learn.

Look out for a future post in which I will talk about other techniques to achieve a powerful memory!

You can check out our programmes to see how we use some of the mentioned techniques in our tuition.