Three Study Skills that Make the Most of Executive Function

Written By Tera Sumpter

In my last blog post, How to Study Effectively, I explained that retaining information in our memories has as much to do with output activities as input activities. If your study habits are all about staring at a book or a screen and listening to someone else talk, you’re not likely to retain what you learn. Output activities are where you regenerate that information or use it in a new and creative way. In this blog post, I’ll provide some examples of output activities I teach my kids and my clients to help them retain what they are learning as effectively as possible. 

Before we dive in, let me reiterate some important points about WHY these study skills help.

The more we engage working memory, the more likely what we are trying to learn will stick in our long-term memory. Working memory is a complicated concept. I won’t do a thorough analysis here, but if you want to learn more about it, you can join my online educational community. The important functions of working memory that are helpful to remember for these activities are:

  1. Comparing and contrasting or analyzing: If we are just receiving information and synthesizing none of it, we don’t engage working memory as much, and we don’t retain the information. Many of these techniques prompt us to actually think about the material we’re engaging with, exercising working memory.

  2. Internalizing: Internalizing is one of the key functions of working memory. Internalizing is creating a mental or imaginative sensory experience of a thought or event. Visualizing—or creating an internal picture in our imaginations—is one of the principal ways to internalize something you are learning. But there are other ways to internalize, like imagining sounds or smells. You usually do it without even thinking about it. But if you’re engaged mainly in input learning, you may not internalize nearly enough. Internalizing—and expressing that internalization through words or drawings–exercises working memory and helps us retain the material we’re trying to learn. Think of it this way: are you more likely to remember the sentence “The cat rode a horse” verbatim, or the mental image of the cat riding a horse? What if you visualize the cat in a cowboy costume? Visualization is helpful. More detailed visualization is even better.

Here are some output activities that help engage working memory as you study.

Study skill #1: Taking Notes

Taking notes helps us put the information we’re learning in our own words. You don’t even need to go back and ready them again later to benefit from the activity. Just writing them down is the important part of the activity. There are a lot of ways to take notes, though, and some are more helpful for good study habits than others. Here are some tips for effective note taking:

Go Old School: UsePen & Paper!

Use a pen or pencil and paper. Research shows that this makes the output activity more effective. In one of my favorite books, Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day, Dr. Amishi Jha explains why this is more helpful than using a laptop or other electronic device: “One of the things we do naturally when we take handwritten notes is synthesize—we pay attention while listening, then analyze what was said to pull out or summarize the most important points. We have to: we simply can't write fast enough to transcribe every word we hear, so we have to be strategic. And when we do this kind of synthesis, we're better able to encode that information in a richer, fuller, more integrated, and consequently more long-lasting way. Note-taking on laptops ends up being a great way to get a good transcription of a lecture into your computer, but a really bad way to get any of that lecture content into your long-term memory.”

Taking notes with a pen or pencil is a more mindful and deliberate way to take notes. You can’t run on auto-pilot, you have to engage your brain. This active engagement helps make the knowledge you’re engaging with your own.

You can read more about the measured difference in effectiveness between taking notes on a laptop vs writing them in, Is the Pencil Mightier than the Keyboard? A Meta-Analysis Comparing the Method of Notetaking Outcomes by Mike Allen et al.

Use as Few Words as Possible

Write the main idea and short details. The notes don’t have to be elaborate. Remember, the product of note-taking isn’t as important as the act of writing them down. This is another method of engaging the brain to interact with the information you’re learning. Like with taking notes by hand, summarizing the information as you go requires understanding it well enough to restate it in fewer or different words. Writing it down word for word takes less thought and mental engagement and is therefore less effective at getting the information to stick in your brain.

Review Later

Review notes later on and fill in missing details. This forces an interaction between what you remember and what is on the page. This is another way your brief notes from the last tip come in handy! When you re-read your notes and compare them to what you remember in your head, this engages the working memory. Holding and evaluating the information in your working memory is a necessary step to take to get it into your long-term memory. If you have access to recordings, reviewing them with your notes can also be helpful. You are still actively engaging your working memory by comparing what’s in your memory to what’s in the recording to what’s on the page. Again, the output is less important than the act of comparing.

Highlight Important Points

Highlighting helps your brain create a hierarchy of the ideas you are trying to remember. Each time you go through the material again, you understand it a little better. You may realize that some notes are more important than others (or even just more important to you). Identifying which notes are more important helps your brain synthesize the information.  You can highlight the main idea one color and the important details different colors.  

Doodle (No, Really!)

Supplement written notes with pictures of important details in the margins. This really gets into nonverbal working memory, a key executive function skill. It’s also sometimes referred to as the visuospatial sketchpad. When you engage both verbal working memory (the notes) and nonverbal working memory (the pictures you draw), you’re exercising your working memory in two ways instead of just one.

REMEMBER: Reading the notes is input. Writing the notes is output. When using notes to study, just reading them is only meeting the “input” requirement. Close the circuit by actively engaging with what you wrote.

Study Skill #2: Annotating

Annotating is like taking notes, except you’re interacting with a text. It’s when you pick parts of the text to emphasize or make brief notes. Think of it as a lighter version of note-taking. Here are a few ways to do it:

Margin Notes

Take notes in the margins of a book or text. (You can do this electronically, but, like I said in the note-taking section, it works better if you use a good, old-fashioned pen or pencil.) You can also summarize key points and jot down main ideas in margins. These should be short, with as few words as possible. The main point is that you are interacting with the idea, finding your own words to describe it or summarize it.

Highlighting

Underline or highlight important details. This is probably the lightest-touch annotation you can do. But your brain is interacting with the material. Your working memory is helping you analyze what you’re reading to determine what the most important points are. It’s identifying what needs to go into your long-term memory.

Study skill #3: Associating 

You’ve probably encountered associating as a tool for remembering information or for developing habits. That’s because it’s an effective way to leverage something you already know or do to help remember something new. Associating works because it’s taking a piece of information from input learning activities and telling the brain to actively and creatively synthesize it with information that’s already stored.The output? A bundle of old and new that is unique to your brain!

Connect New Information to Something You Already Know

How do you do it? The key is to connect new information to something you already know. Imagine you need to remember that the French Revolution happened in 1789. Imprinting those numbers onto your memory with no additional connections or context can be tough. It might require going around chanting “1-7-8-9” in a hushed voice until your friends and family think you’re a little weird. But if you know that the United States declared independence in 1776, you could remember that the French Revolution was 13 years later. U.S. independence +  Lucky 13 = French Revolution!

The second piece of information that you’re using to help you remember doesn’t even have to be related. Maybe 1, 7, 8, and 9 are the last four digits of your grandma’s phone number. Just tell yourself to think of your Grandma when you’re remembering the French Revolution, and the date will be much more likely to stay in your long-term memory. Why? You guessed it! Because associating it with the other piece of information is an output activity that exercises working memory!

Relate to Words, Such as Mnemonic Devices

Creating mnemonic devices is also helpful. A mnemonic device is a sentence that helps us remember a string of words, or remember the letters of one word. Did you learn Every Good Boy Does Fine to help you remember the music notes written on the bars of the treble clef? (E, G, B, D, and F) How about “Roy G. Biv” to help you remember the colors of the rainbow? (Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.) As the Roy G. Biv example illustrates, the mnemonic device doesn’t even have to make sense on its own, it just needs to be easier to remember than the longer phrase you’re trying to commit to memory. What makes the mnemonic device effective is that the act of associating the word or phrase with the mnemonic device is an output activity.

Relate Visually

Another way to associate is to relate something visually, like relating items that look similar or remind you of something. Maybe the piece of new information is the word “tentacles.” It sounds like “ten tickles” and you picture an octopus. With so many legs, that octopus could easily give ten tickles, couldn’t it? Okay, that example isn’t a straightforward example of relating visually, but there’s definitely a visual component.

What about math? That’s where visualization often comes in handy for me. Basic arithmetic is always a good place to visualize. Having trouble with 5+2? Draw five of… anything. Maybe five cats? Then draw two more. At first, you can count the cats to figure out that there are seven total. But gradually, picturing five then picturing two more becomes so ingrained that your brain no longer requires the visualization to remember the  5+2=7.

Another great visual method of associating is to create a web graphic organizer.  You can plot out the main idea in the middle with all the important details extending out from the main idea, color coding categories of details as you go by highlighting the circles different colors.  All “where” information is in green.  All “what happened” information is in red.  And all “when” information is in blue.  This creates a concise visual of the text you’re trying to learn. 

Creating Internal Representation

This is visualizing or internalizing the information to create an internal representation or mental experience of the information. This differs slightly from relating visually in that it’s more experiential than a simple visual representation. Say you’re learning about the battle at Gettysburg. Reading a story about the battle and actively imagining the experience–the smell of gunpowder, the feel of the scratchy uniform, the sounds of musket fire and yelling, the sensation of running up and down the hills and between the trees. These will help you remember aspects of the battle you are studying. Sometimes I think of this as creating a movie in your head, but it’s important to remember that, for this to be an output activity, it needs to be generated in your imagination. Watching a movie could be effective, but engaging in an activity where you create your own internal representation of what happened will definitely make it stick in your mind.

Sometimes writing the internal representations can help make it more real and vivid. A story prompt can help with this. When writing your imagined representation, include something for each of the five senses: sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing.

Bonus: Apps to Help Use Both Input and Output 

Here are a few apps I like to use to support both input and output activities in studying:

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Tera Sumpter
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