6 Questions to Ask Yourself to Increase Retention

 
 

How to Remember What You Learn: Review and Go Back

Checking in with yourself

Another thing that’s important when solving a problem is to make sure that you leave time at the end to ask:

  1. What happened?

  2. What was hard?

  3. How is it different from other stuff you’ve done?

  4. How is it similar to other stuff you’ve done?

  5. What patterns do you see?

  6. What did you do here that we can apply to future problems?

Looking ahead

I always say that no matter what kind of problem I’m doing or what kind of concept we’re teaching, it’s not about this problem; it’s about the next problem. It’s about seeing the next problem and understanding how to conquer it and how to take it apart. This entails looking at my careless errors.

This is especially important when looking at math. What are the things that I actually know and just screwed up because I wasn’t thinking. Or, when we’re doing writing and we’re trying to decide whether we need a comma or a period in this particular place. We know that there’s a rule and we need to be able to retrieve it. So, what was the problem? Did you not remember to retrieve the rule or did you misremember the application of the rule, because those are two totally different things and two different problems that we need to solve.

So we want to focus on the mistakes that you are making, because that is low-hanging fruit. If you are making a careless mistake and I can remind you that it’s careless, then I can remind you how to avoid making that mistake and then you actually know how to do that so that you don’t lose points on the test, you don’t make that mistake in front of your classmates, and you don’t lose points on that when you hand in a paper to your professor.

 
 

Stay tuned for more tips on increasing retention! For more studying and test-prep tips, check out our blog.

Jumpstart your SAT® prep with us

SSA MethodsAlyssa the College ExpertArticle