Remember

Why remember?

New knowledge is not that helpful if you can’t remember it. This does not mean you have to memorise books verbatim, that would make no sense and would take special skill. What you need to do is remember the core of the material. This means this step requires more than one skill. The focus will be on the remembering part, however.

Example

Sometimes you have a teacher who will explain to you the grammar rules for the past simple, for instance. This means the rules presented to you by the teacher are the core of what you need to know, not the conjugation of a list of two hundred verbs into the past simple. Sometimes, especially for self-study, you need to do this on your own. A skilled called ‘analysing’ is quite important here, but it is also considered one of the higher thinking skills. This means that it is hard to do with knew knowledge or when learning a new skill. For more info on analysing, click here.

Memory should not be the focus of your learning cycle. Although it is a helpful tool, learning how to implement and work with the information given is more important and will further your learning curve more than just memorizing information.

Your previous knowledge also plays a large role here. Try to connect to what you already know. This means, for example, that if you have alread been dealing with arachnids in biology class, then it should be easy to link new information about mites and ticks, to previously learnt information about spiders and scorpions.

To maximize this benifit of learning, because it is a hige benifit, always think of what you already know about the subject you are about to learn. Teachers do this all the time and it's called activating previous knowledge. It activates the regions in the brain you need to understand what it coming, and, of course, remember it more easily.