building understanding requires time, and in the initial stages there is a lot that needs to be firmly tamped into your brain, before you truly, deeply, understand

a similar vein, a study involving 8th-grade students9 demonstrated the effectiveness of this kind of mnemonic for remembering the attributes of minerals. The students were given information about nine different minerals, and their attributes on three dimensions: hard/soft, pale/dark, home use/industrial use. Those in the mnemonic condition were giv

How far you extend that depends on how long you need to remember the information for. If you want to remember it permanently, you should review it after two months, and probably again after six months. That’s based on a recent large study6 that explored the optimal gap between study and test: to remember for a week, the optimal gap was one day; for

this is so, it may be that the place method is best used on expository texts, the link method on narratives, and the pegword method on static visual descriptions.

Moreover, it is noteworthy that both groups showed the same level of structural coherence in their essays. Mnemonic techniques have been criticized for “cluttering” the mind with unconnected facts. This finding counters that criticism.

Tellingly, however, the group that saw all this in a picture performed not only significantly better than the group using their own method, but also significantly better than the group given the keywords and iconic images but not shown the illustration or given any description of it (they were simply told to “form a picture in your mind” drawing al

All this would seem to be clear evidence that a single integrated mnemonic should be used for related information. However it should be noted that a previous study4 by these researchers found that separate mnemonics were as effective as an integrated mnemonic when students were asked to learn four 5-sentence biographies. It may be that separate mne

Similarly, when you’re constructing a multi-item mnemonic, you should give some thought to what the retrieval cue is likely to be. In the study just described, for example, it was assumed the theorists’ names (Binet, Spearman, etc) would be given. The student would then retrieve the keyword from the name, and the keyword would trigger the associate

This seems to suggest that it is better to create a single, integrated mnemonics for related information from text, and to create it as a whole once you have gathered all the information.