MEMORY, LEARNING AND IMPROVING CONCENTRATION (II)

 ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGIES

What is organizational strategies?

-Organizational strategies allow you to organize the information to make it easier to learn and recall. For instance, tasks such as listing, ordering, grouping, outlining, mapping, charting, and diagramming. In each of these activities, you act on the material that is to be mastered. With outlining, charting, or mapping, for example, you organize the material in a way that show each component is related to the others.

 

One of the advantages of organizational strategies is that by structuring the material, you provide yourself with new ways to remember many of the details. If you can remember the structure, you'll be able to remember many of the details.

Organize Material by Grouping 

You can improve your ability to learn and recall a large amount of material by grouping or chunking it. However, you should follow some basic guidelines when setting up your groups. First, never set up more than seven groups. Why?

Because you won't be able to remember all the group headings. For the same reason, limit the number of items in each group to seven. Second, be sure you use a simple system. If your plan for remembering the information is extremely complex, you won't be able to remember the information itself. Third, you can't learn the information just by looking at it. You need to write or recite the lists and then test yourself.

Finally, there's a tendency to forget the items in the middle of the list more quickly than those that are first or last.

You can avoid this problem by practicing the items in a different order or by using some of the elaboration strategies previously described.

Remember, the more organized the information when you put it into it, the more easily you'll be able to retrieve it later