Tips and Ideas for our Students

Matayom Study and Exam Preparation Skills

By A.Matthew Platt,
The English Program, Ratchaboriganukroh School,
Ratchaburi, 2009.

There are 3 types of memory:

• Working memory
• Short-term memory (STM)
• Long-term memory (LTM)

Working memory is very short-term, and you use it to hold a limited amount of information that you will need when trying to solve a problem or complete a task. Once the task is over, if the information has not been entered (actively) into STM or LTM, it will be lost permanently.

Short-term memory lasts for ONLY a few hours, or maybe a day or so. Passive reading usually stores information in STM only. And the size of STM is never large enough to pass a difficult or long exam (even a 60-minute exam).
So, in order to learn the information and remember it effectively for the exam, and possibly beyond, you need to store the information in LTM.

Long-term memory (LTM)
There are quite a few ways of putting the information into LTM.
If you have a long time for your revision, using the information many times (weeks or months) will help store the information in LTM. It’s a good idea to start your revision very early for this reason! If lots of the information is new, or you don’t understand it yet, and you only have a short time to study for an exam, you will need to try some other techniques.

In this document, I will give you some ideas for effective exam revision, so that the information you need to learn will go into LTM, and you will have a MUCH better chance of passing and even doing well in the exam!
Before I do that though, a short but important warning: trying to learn a LOT of complex information using passive reading in a few days for a difficult or long exam is not an effective way of learning, and if the amount of information you need to learn is a lot, then studying the day before – called CRAMMING – only (and not even always) stores the information into STM, and also reduces the size of working memory by increasing stress and through information overload. You will be too stressed and your working memory will fail you because it won’t operate effectively.

SOME EXAM PREPARATION TECHNIQUES
You will need to carefully choose a period of time to sit down, without disturbances like music and talking, to do your revision. Set a time period (40 minutes is common), and make sure you revise for all of that time. Also be careful that you don’t revise for much LONGER than that time, either, as you will exhaust yourself, and your revision will not be effective. Plan enough of these revision periods to cover all of the information you need to learn for each subject you have an exam for, and then time to read and further memorise what you have revised. Most importantly, you need to write things down during your revision. Again, don’t rely on JUST reading the information a few times from a book or worksheet!

The first thing to do is to find out EXACTLY what you need to learn for the exam. You will not be able to learn everything, and then reproduce it in the exam! Your teacher will have told you what is going to be in the exam, and use this information because it is very, very important!

The next thing to do is to organize what you know will be in the exam. Write all of the topics on a piece of paper, and then find out what main ideas, concepts, terms (vocabulary) and major headings and sub-headings are included in that topic. So, list the major topic headings on the top, and then write a list under each topic heading showing a summary of what is included in those topics.

As I said before, you will not be able to remember all of the words and sentences from your books and worksheets. Also, some of the sentences will be complex and could be written in an easier to understand and remember format. So, you need to do 2 things:

• Summarise the information – choose the most important information
• Re-write (or draw) the information, as described below, in your own words

If you write things in your own words, 3 clever things happen.
First, you will force yourself to understand the full meaning of the information from the book or worksheet so that you can re-write it in your own words.
Second, it will start to “write” the information into STM and LTM.
Third, your own words will be easier to remember!
Look at all of the books and worksheets you need to learn from, and find all of the important terms.
Then write a list on a piece of paper defining all of them in your own words.
You will need to follow a similar technique with concepts and processes.
Some ways of doing this are described below.

I have written a detailed example to give you an idea:
Original paragraph:
“A problem with selective breeding is INBREEDING. In nature, animals and plants tend to reproduce (with sexual reproduction) with the same species from a wide area, and from a larger population. This means that new beneficial traits can be introduced into the genetic material of the organisms (DNA). This is called having a large GENE POOL. Also, in nature, unhealthy organisms die, and their unviable (unhealthy, weak) DNA is removed from the gene pool (because they don’t reproduce). When organisms from a small population (such as just within the group of dogs in a breeder’s house) are mated, poor DNA can stay within the very small gene pool, and new beneficial DNA isn’t introduced. This is called inbreeding, and is one of the reasons humans aren’t allowed to marry and sleep with parents, children, or other close relatives. In dogs, for example,  inbreeding has led to a large number of permanent problems in the genetic material of many dogs, for example hip problems and short life-spans in Rottweilers, heart problems in Silky Terriers, eyes popping out in pugs.”

An example summary:

• INBREEDING: a problem with sexual reproduction when the population number is small, and no new DNA is coming into the population, and weak or poor quality DNA is not being removed.
• GENE POOL: All of the genetic material (DNA) in the sex cells of organisms (or living things) in a population
• UNVIABLE: Unable to live for a long time and reproduce
• Consequences of inbreeding: producing unhealthy organisms that have problems with their DNA that might make their life shorter, or give them pain

• Taking notes – in your own words, and MAKE SURE YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE WRITING

Lists, using bullet points or numbers or letters are good ways of taking notes. Again, don’t try to remember everything, especially in the same way that the teacher or book author wrote it! Also, choose only the important ideas, and you can often ignore examples (UNLESS the examples will be useful in the exam).

• Drawing concept pictures/diagrams

In order to represent something as a picture/diagram, you will need to think hard about how the information is organized and relates to each other. It’s an excellent way of forcing yourself to understand and creatively display the information… and this leads to very effective long-term learning.

As an example, I have drawn a simple picture to represent the Science concept of a nimbus cloud, which is a dark cloud that doesn’t let sunlight pass through it. Instead of just reading or writing out that information, I represent it as a picture, which will also be easier to memorise later on. The picture doesn’t need to be complex, or large, and certainly not “beautiful” or even particularly neat… but it should explain FULLY the concept you are trying to represent and learn. Using labels is very, very important.

Here’s an example picture:

Spider diagrams are useful ways of showing organization. A very simple example is given below:

• Drawing process diagrams

Drawing process diagrams follows the same guidelines as drawing concept diagrams, except that the most important thing is to show how the change happens. Arrows are commonly used.

For example, to represent the process of evaporation, where a liquid such as water turns into a gas (such as water vapour) when it is heating, I could use the following picture:

A popular technique is then to take all of the notes, lists, definitions, formulae (from subjects like Mathematics and Science) diagrams and either write them on a single large piece of paper (or 2 or at most 3), or writing them on FLASH CARDS, which a small index cards that you can then use for memorization.

MEMORISATION
As you are preparing your notes, diagrams etc. you will (hopefully) be being very active in interacting with the information… this will write into your LTM. You should also leave quite a bit of time at the end of the revision time for just reading through your notes (many times if possible) and committing it permanently to both STM and LTM ready for the exam. You will find by this time that the amount and format of the information you need to memorise will be much more manageable and easy to understand, and then reproduce in the exam. Remember, though, that in order for this to be effective, your notes should include all that you need to learn for the exam. Finally, start testing how well you have remembered what you have revised so far, and then start asking yourself practice questions, and slowly start answering practice questions in detail with less and less help from the notes. Ideally, you should arrive at a point when you feel confident answering questions without ANY help from the notes.

Before I finish, a few suggestions for actually completing the exam. First, try your best to answer ALL of the questions, even if for some of the questions you can only write a small amount, or even just draw a small picture or write down some brief notes. At least you will then have a chance for receiving SOME marks for those questions. Secondly, if you find a very difficult question that you don’t feel confident about answering, don’t spend too much time on the question: you will be using your limited time better on questions you feel more comfortable about answering in detail. Leave the question and try a different one, and come back to the more difficult question later (try to leave a little time for it) after you are happy with your other answers.