Part 1
Two Strategies to Improve Memory
We are learning new things every now and then. Hence, memorize new information
becomes critical, especially for university students who are bombarded with academic
knowledge every schoolday. At this point, it is significant to improve memory.
According to Higbee, the strategies to improve memory include meaningfulness,
organization, association, visualization, and attention (2001). Among those strategies,
I am introducing two strategies: meanfulness and association. As the word suggests,
meaningfulness means to understand the meaning of the things learner are learning
and remembering. In other word, “how easy something is to learn is how meaningful
it is to the learner” (Higbee, 2001).This principle is based on encoding-retrieval
principle (Wood et al., 2013). The “meaningfulness” strategy makes a differece at the
very beginning. It provides a different way in encoding information. I was required to
remember some poems in grade school, which is obiously a very difficult task. As a
result, our teacher carefully explained the meaning of the poems, using a lot of plain
words. To our surprise, it was not hard to remember those scary poems at all. I find
the strategy significant also by watching people aroud me. One of my roommates is a
Master of Finance student. Unlike last semester, they are not allowed to bring the “the
cheat sheet” (a piece of paper on which students can write formulars and strategies) in
the midterms this semester. Complaints aside, they still have to remember more than
20 strategies. My roommate told me she can never remember things unless she
understands the meaning of it, so she did several exercise to apply the strategies;
therefore, she successfully kept the strategies in mind. From what is mentioned above,
meaningfulness plays an important in learning.
Apart from the “meaningfulness” strategy, the strategy “association” is also critical
not only in learning things, but in daily life. According to Higbee, if we hear someone
say “it remins me of”, it means that person associate “it” with “the past experience”
(2001). Higbee claims that “Association can help memory by giving us cross-
referencing in our memories”. This stratedy is based on “The Cue-Driven Principle”.
Cue means “a specific prompt or query” (Surprenant & Neath, 2009). In a nutshell,
