A guest blog from Dr Jenny Shipway, who studied biochemistry at university and now works in science communication and education training.
Everything’s Connected
Memory Palaces
Some people specialise in memorising long strings of boring information. One trick they use is to imagine the information located along a walking route. Imagine if you had to remember a list of household appliances. You might imagine a kettle outside your front door, and a dishwasher at the end of your garden path. There could be a toaster on the road outside, and a microwave on the corner down the road. As you mentally rewalked the route, you would ‘look’ in each location and see the objects, which would be remembered in the right order.
The reason why such tricks are necessary is that your brain can’t remember unrelated information. Every new tidbit must be linked to something that you already know. Linking it to something you know well, like the route from your house, helps pin it in place.
One of the great challenges of A level biology is that you need to really understand things, rather than just memorising facts and figures. It’s about deeper concepts rather than surface facts. But the good news is that this actually makes it easier to remember the associated facts - each piece of information is related to others, and the more interlinked it is, the easier it will be to recall.
Toto I don’t think we’re in GCSE any more
Synoptic Thinking
Some of the most challenging exam questions are those that require you to think between topics. Rather than drawing on your memory of one specific part of the course, they demand you reach into your understanding of multiple areas to solve a single problem. This is similar to the type of thinking you would need as a researcher, where bringing in knowledge from other disciplines can help solve problems in novel ways.
Although the A-level specification is split into sections, biology itself is a intricately interlinked tangle of concepts with uncountable interdependencies. Pity the teacher who has to decide in which order to tackle the topics given how everything seems to underpin everything else in some way or another.
How to Revise
Don’t avoid the complexities of how the topics interrelate. By noticing and thinking about these, you can make it easier to both understand and remember concepts. And make it easier for you to jump between different areas for those synoptic questions.
To really understand a complex concept, it’s necessary to look at it from different angles, on different days, considering multiple different examples. Brains are incredible things: when they are fed enough examples and surface facts, and allowed to really think, they can magic up a deep understanding beyond anything that is easily written down. It’s not possible to simply read this type of deep understanding in (brains are nothing like computers); the understanding has to be created in the context of your own mind. Looking at topics from the angle of intersecting topics is a great way to feed your brain with new information to help it build understanding.
When you spot a link to a previous topic, give yourself a bit of time to recall what you previously learned, to think about the new topic from that angle and consider how they intersect. As well as helping your brain build understanding, making these links will make it easier to recall information. The more interlinked information is, the easier it is to recall.
What did your kettle look like?
Use Your Self
Every brain is different. Everyone who imagines walking past a kettle on their front step has a different image in mind. Do they imagine tripping over it if the step is narrow? Or is it sat on a plant pot? What colour is the kettle? Everything will be drawn from prior experience, and this is one of the reasons it works well as a memory trick - it’s linking to things your brain already know about.
If you can link anything in your course to strong memories, or especially to yourself, this will help you recall it later. When you learn about parts of the body, link it in your mind to your own experience of having a body. If you learn about a disease, think about someone you know with that disease while you study. Or imagine what it’d be like if you were a doctor treating it, or if you had it yourself - how you would feel, what you would do? Linking new information to our sense of self is possibly the strongest way to flag up information for later recall.
In a nutshell:
Identify and explore connections / interdependencies between biology topics
Think about concepts in the context of your own life
If you find something hard to remember, try finding more links between it and things you already know well
Dr Jenny Shipway
www.jennyshipway.com