How to Remember Everything You Learn in School (BONUS: 6 Memory Hacks)
We learn a lot of things while in school and beyond the four walls of a school, but we forget a lot of the information learned. However, there are some strategies you can use to better recall what you learn. These include having a positive mindset about your memory capacity, studying in a quiet place, encoding information correctly, discussing learned topics, and testing yourself.
I am quite certain that you have at least once been in a situation where you were asked, “Hey, what have you learned in school today?” And you couldn’t remember.
Whether you are a student or a working professional, after reading this post, such embarrassment will never happen to you anymore.
But then, why do we forget?
And how can we remember what we have learned much better?
In this post, you will learn about some tricks and memory hacks that can help you remember what you have learned in school.
Why do you tend to forget what you learn in school?
In the late 1880s, Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, researched memory and how it works. He described the “forgetting curve,” which proves that after one hour of learning something new, we forget more than 50% of the information, about 70% after 24 hours, and 75 percent after six days.
This means that we only remember just about 25 percent of what we learned after six days.
Another reason we forget is that forgetting is a vital function of our brain. It tends to delete irrelevant information it feels we don’t need and saves only important bits.
For this reason, any new information we receive is stored in our short-term memory, and they are easily forgotten to protect us from information overload.
If we are to recall, we must help our brain to recognize that a piece of information is essential and teach it to remember by repeating the information or using it repeatedly.
There are techniques beyond just repeating information that you can use to maximize your memory. You can learn more about this on Iris Reading.
Tricks to remember what you have learned in school
Whether you are professional preparing to give a presentation at TEDx or a student preparing for a project defense or a final year seminar presentation, memorizing a large chunk of information during such times could be quite a tensive period for most people.
Many students and professionals believe that they do not have good memory skills, and some have completely given up on their ability to comprehend and remember what they have learned.
The good news is that you do not have to be a genius to be able to recall what you have learned. Anyone can learn to improve their ability to comprehend and remember what they learned using simple tricks that we will discuss below.
Have a positive mindset about your memory capacity
The simple truth is that if you do not believe in your brain’s capacity to learn and remember, the result is that you will always forget what you learn.
Having a positive mindset about your ability to remember encourages your brain to capture and retain information received.
As corny as it sounds, the brain remembers what you tell it to retain. However, this requires some effort and practice, which we will dwell on in the other tricks shared in this post.
Encode information correctly
The first stage of learning and remembering anything is to pay attention to the information being received and correctly encode the information into your long-term memory for later use.
You need to pay good attention to the information received to understand it, organize it, and memorize it. The better you can organize the information that you want to remember, the easier it is for you to encode and memorize it.
If you realize that you do not fully comprehend an idea or information, spend some time understanding it and organizing it before trying to memorize it.
Consolidate information through sleep
Research has shown that even while we sleep, the subconscious part of our brain doesn’t.
Even though our brain does not sleep, the active part of our brain needs to take a slight break from thinking.
When we sleep, the subconscious part of our brain, which is the part of the brain that empowers our long-term memories, takes over completely. So, while we go to sleep, our brain processes information, connects both new and old data, and stores it.
To improve your ability to remember what you have learned, it is advised to review materials just before going to sleep, even if it’s just for a few minutes.
You can check out our speed-reading course and speed reading tool to learn how to review materials faster before you go to bed. These resources can aid you in your study and sleep technique, which has been proven to boost memory retention.
Study in a quiet environment
To properly encode materials that you want to remember, you need to eradicate anything that can distract your ability to focus on the study. When studying, ensure that there is no music on, TV on, or noise in the background.
You need to clear your mind of any worries or personal problems. If you fail to remove distractions, you may experience poor learning and recall.
Study and prepare for your presentations, tests, or exams in a quiet place that will stay quiet until you are done studying.
Discuss learned topics with yourself
An excellent trick to help you remember what you have learned is to have a discussion with yourself about the topic you have read. By doing this, you get to encode the information into your brain and also understand how well you have been able to familiarize yourself with the information you want to remember.
Join a group-based learning team
Being part of a group-based learning team enables you to have good discussions about what was taught in class.
Even after doing your study and having a discussion with yourself, discussing the material with others helps clarify information that you didn’t understand quite well, thereby strengthening your ability to remember what was taught in class.
Test yourself
Merely reading and rereading materials may cause you to think that you have the information perfectly stored in your brain. The final trick to help you better remember is to quiz yourself or study questions on the materials that you want to recall.
You may be surprised to find out that you were only familiarized with the information but have yet to memorize it.
Do memory hacks help with remembering what you’ve learned?
We all have been in a situation (work or school) where we have to learn a large chunk of information in a very short period.
In such instances, most people read through the materials over and over again in the hope that they will remember some of the information to perform well in a test or presentation.
However, this technique of repeatedly going through the materials is boring and ineffective. According to basic neuroscience and psychology research, it doesn’t align with our brain’s mechanism.
Fortunately, there are some deliberate memory hacks that this same research has reported to work with our brain. Studies also show that students who use memory hacks recall what they have learned and perform better than those who do not.
Tried and tested memory hacks
You have to be deliberate in helping your brain store information, no matter how confident you are in your ability to recall. If you don’t work on your memory rote, the chances are you will soon forget what you have recently learned.
A series of studies have shown most students do not use methods that have been proven to make learning and recalling easier. Instead, they waste their time on futile methods.
Memory hacks such as mnemonic, spaced repetitions, memory palace, and linking once mastered can help us strengthen our working memory, access our long-term memory, boost our productivity, and store information for years as described below.
Make use of Flashcards
Flashcards are very effective in helping you memorize new information. They are used for materials that require a lot of memorization.
Prepare a stack of flashcards carrying the information you want to learn so, whenever you have free time, you can use them to memorize what you want to remember.
Mind Palace
The mind palace, also called the memory palace, is a technique that is more than 2500 years old.
It is a memory system that requires you to use the blueprint of a familiar location, like your house, to memorize what you intend to recall.
This system requires you to number some items in this location. For example, in your house, you could pick your lampstand, table, chairs, and TV, and number them as 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively.
These locations are where you will store the information you want to remember.
You can learn how to create a memory palace to remember information right here.
Make use of your phone voice record features
Studies show that most people are within arm’s length of their mobile phones.
You can make use of your phone’s voice record function to record information you want to remember and listen to the recording a few times.
This memory hack is effective because it involves most of your senses. First, you see the information, read it out loud, and then listen to the information.
This means that you saw the information with your eyes, read it with your mouth, and heard it with your ear. All together, they help strengthen your ability to remember the information.
Mnemonics
Mnemonics are memory aid systems usually in the form of associations, such as ROYGBIV, which is used to remember the colors of the rainbow.
Mnemonics can help you remember words. For example, to remember the first 20 elements in the periodic table, you might have learned in junior high “Hello Hello Let Big Boys Come Near Our Flat Never Send Men Away Since People Shall Come And Pursue Captain,” where the first letter of each word stands for Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Fluorine, Neon, Sodium, Magnesium, Aluminum, Silicon, Phosphorus, Sulphur, Chlorine, Argon, Potassium, Calcium, respectively.
Chunking
Chunking is a memory aid system where you take different pieces of information and group them into larger blocks. Chunking information into these large blocks helps you memorize a large amount of data. For example, a phone number arrangement of 9-0-5-5-9-2-3 can be chunked into 905-5923.
You can learn how to chunk large amounts of information and memorize them easily by taking our course on maximizing memory.
Don’t just recall, write it out
Writing out what we recall helps solidify the information learned in our memories, as research has proven that there is a direct link between our hands and our brain.
So instead of just trying to recall what you have learned, try writing out what you remember, read it out loud, and visualize your thoughts. Practicing this memory hack will help to efficiently transfer information from the short-term memory into your long-term memory.
Conclusion
Remembering everything learned in school can be quite challenging for a lot of people. Learning these tried and tested memory tricks and hacks is a great way to remember quickly, remember longer, and perform better than your peers.
Some of these techniques will take some time to master, but the more you practice them, the easier they become, and the more information you will be able to memorize.
Also, note that you do not need to learn every hack on this list.
Test a few and see which ones work for you best.
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