Professor shares some secrets to learning

When it comes to remembering what you learn, technology is not always a good thing, according to Bill Klemm, professor of neuroscience at Texas A&M.

"The two main problems students have with learning easily are identified: time management and multi-tasking," he said.

Klemm, who began teaching at A&M in 1966 in the biology department and now teaches at the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, said students often don't learn time management skills before they get to college. Once there, students are overwhelmed with "so many things to do."

Multi-tasking also prevents them from learning effectively, he said.

"When I was in school, we didn't have television, we didn't have Twitter, or video games. It was a lot easier to study and concentrate," he said.

His interest in applying what memory researchers have discovered to help students led to writing the book Better Grades, Less Effort that published about a year ago. It's an explanation of 20 tips that will help students learn. He has written 12 other published books, and writes The Memory Medic column in The Eagle's monthly 50 Plus special section.

He priced it affordably at $2.49 and recently finished recording it as an audio book.

How it started

Klemm said he became interested in learning about memory when he was a child and his father was a recruiter for The Dale Carnegie course, which included lessons on memorization. Klemm said he took the class and became good at memorization.

He said he is now "semi-retired" and teaches one freshman year seminar at A&M to help freshmen adapt.

Klemm said he often sees college students who weren't taught study skills in high school. When they get to college, they realize they really don't know as much as they should, he said.

A fad, especially in science, is "inquiry learning," Klemm said, which focuses on hands-on activities as a way to learn science. That's fine, he said, but students still need to be able to remember science lessons.

Motivate your memory

Klemm aimed his book at students in high school, college or job training programs. It's also for elementary school students, but parents should read and explain his tips.

The most common explanation for failure of people to remember new learned events, he writes, is that after a learning event, a certain amount of uninterrupted time is needed to "consolidate" the short-term memory into a more lasting one. If new stimuli is presented immediately after learning something new, people can forget what they learned, he said.

Klemm's first of 20 tips is, "Get motivated, be attentive." He writes that if people want to learn, they will, and sufficient motivation can help them overcome almost anything, including bad teaching, boring subjects and personal problems.

"Motivation comes from attitude, and attitude matters," he writes. "In a school environment, one of the most destructive things to a positive attitude about learning is early experience with performing less well than hoped for."

He also suggests that people improve their attentiveness.

What people learn is limited to what they pay attention to, Klemm writes, and they should decide what to pay attention to and for how long. People who multi-task don't do an optimal job on any of the tasks because "the brain does not have the capacity to pay attention to everything at once," he writes.

Commit, believe

His second tip is, "Commit the time." Klemm writes that to get good grades, most students must study hard and study smart. This includes managing time effectively; people often spend time on little things like frequent texting, he writes, and then don't have enough time for learning and studying. He suggests keeping a calendar diary and logging in what is done each hour of the day.

Klemm writes that students should make studying their first priority, and allocate time each day to study what they learned in class that day. He warns students should not procrastinate and then "cram," which he writes is the most common and destructive learning practice for most students. Studying the last day or so before the exam means it takes more time to achieve the same results than it does to study a few minutes each day, and it also usually results in the study material not being cemented into long-term memory, he says.

Third tip: "Don't memorize by rote." Students should find associations to help memorize things, rather than by rote, or memorization by repetition, Klemm says.

"Just reviewing something over and over is not very reliable because there are no cues or associations to help form the memory or recall it," he writes.

Fourth tip: "Memorize only what you can't deduce." Efficient memorization strategies must include distinguishing information that students must memorize from the information they can get to by reasoning. This reduces the amount of information that has to be memorized.

Fifth tip: "Believe in your ability -- and make those beliefs correct." Beliefs about memory ability can cause a poor memory, Klemm says. Those who have convinced themselves that they have a weakness in memory ability may not do what is needed to improve their capability, he writes.

Experiments have shown that students overestimate how much they know and underestimate the value of repeated study of the same material.

For more of his tips, go to www.smashwords.com/books/view/24623.