Student’s Name
Instructor’s Name
Course
Date
Email to a Friend who is Failing, Offering Advice
Hi,
How are you?
I trust you are doing quite well, my friend. This email is to advise you on how to succeed based on memory and recognition. I understand you have been failing in your exams. This is the best moment I will advise you on how to apply memory and cognition in learning. First, you need to understand what it means by memory encoding, storage and retrieval. Out of the three, memory retrieval plays a significant role in success. The success in academics is based on long term memory, and this involves a process known as encoding. A student is needed to have a long term memory which will facilitate retrieving for college student success during exams. Therefore, for a college student to be successful, it is crucial to understand memory and how it functions.
Students should avoid short term memories as that will make them fail in their exams. Facts and memory are part of semantic memory. These kinds of memories do not require to be linked with a personal skill the way an episodic memory can usually will (Radvansky et al. 136). For instance, it is vital to understand when seated for the exam; you should not remember the responses based on where you were when you were studying for the exam or how the weather was like. As a student, you are expected to retrieve information from the long term memory and apply it in your papers to pass.
There are numerous means to transfer information in long-term memory which will enable students to learn and be able to retrieve the encoded information for use in the exams. The methods of transferring the information include the act of repeating information, rehearsal (Chen et al. 398). This method is useful as it facilitates long term memory. To be successful as a college student, you should use methods such as encoding to move information from short term memory to long term memory.
As a student, you might feel confident comprehending new material they covered. Then weeks later, before an exam, they realize that they can only remember what the instructor taught during the last few days and the earlier content has vanished from the memory because the student has failed to store the information in the long term memory. Radvansky argues there is an indication from the research that 80% of people forget what they learned a day later and this gives the reason why I am advising you to always transfer the information in the long term memory (139).
Storing what you have learned in short term memory enables vanishing of the information. The goal of learning is to remember later what you were learning and move it to long term memory where it can be retrieved later from short term memory where it vanishes quickly. For you to success, the following strategies are useful in removing information from short term memory to long term memory: studying regularly for shorter periods, beginning reviewing new content learned after a short time, and using repetition (Chen et al. 400). These strategies are very significant in enabling students to store information in long, which will be useful later, for instance, in exams. Storing information in short memory will always lead to failure because students fail to fall required strategies to store information where it is required. Therefore, I advise you to learn how to store information in long term memory for easier retrieval when having exams to pass.
All the best,
Kind regards,
Works Cited
Chen, Lang, et al. “Positive attitude toward math supports early academic success: Behavioral evidence and neurocognitive mechanisms.” Psychological science 29.3 (2018): 390-402.
Radvansky, Gabriel A., and Jeffrey M. Zacks. “Event boundaries in memory and cognition.” Current opinion in behavioural sciences 17 (2017): 133-140.