

This can also help with persistence, with keeping at it when things are tough. It can increase students’ day-to-day and semester-to-semester motivation because they see that each course is part of a greater whole that will help them in the future. This can set a purpose and a direction for students. Students who have long term life and career goals see college as one step towards achieving their goals. Let’s take a look at successful student have goals. Even if you have already thought about these questions, it’s good to reaffirm your commitment to your plan as we begin to consider what’s really involved in being a college student. So the most important place to start is to consider why you’re here, what matters to you, and what you expect to get out it. It’s really much more about you than it is about college. Mark Murphy is the CEO of Leadership IQ and the author of Hiring For Attitude.Succeeding in college is rather like succeeding in life. And your goals absolutely should qualify as truly important stuff. Writing things down doesn’t just help you remember, it makes your mind more efficient by helping you focus on the truly important stuff. But when people were taking notes, they remembered many more important facts and many fewer unimportant facts (and that, my friends, is the secret of “A” students). it won’t be on the test)? Well, one study found that when people weren’t taking notes in class, they remembered just as many unimportant facts as they did important facts (there’s a recipe for a “C”).

it’ll be on the test) and then there’s the not so important (i.e. You know how when you’re in a classroom setting there’s some stuff the teacher says that’s really important (i.e. Writing it down will also improve your recall of the really important information. It’s not just general recall that improves when you write things down. Parenthetically, if you’re being interviewed for a job, and you want the interviewer to remember you, you better hope he or she is taking notes.

When the interviewers took notes about their interviews with each of the candidates, they were able to recall about 23% more nuggets of information from the interviews than people who didn’t take notes. However, one group of researchers looked at people conducting hiring interviews. Typically, subjects for these types of studies are students taking notes in class. Study after study shows you will remember things better when you write them down. In essence, you get a double whammy that really sears the goal into your brain. There’s a lot of cognitive processing taking place right there. You have to rethink your mental picture, put it on the paper, place objects, scale them, think about their spatial relations, draw facial expressions, etc. It’s a nice edge to have and, when you write down your goal, you get to access the “generation effect” twice: first, when you generate the goal (create a picture in your mind), and second, when you write it down because you’re essentially reprocessing or regenerating that image. Neuropsychologists have identified the “generation effect” which basically says individuals demonstrate better memory for material they’ve generated themselves than for material they’ve merely read. In other words, when you write it down it has a much greater chance of being remembered. From there, decisions are made about what gets stored in our long-term memory and, in turn, what gets discarded. Encoding is the biological process by which the things we perceive travel to our brain’s hippocampus where they’re analyzed. It doesn’t take a neuroscientist to know you will remember something much better if you’re staring at a visual cue (aka reminder) every single day.īut there’s another deeper phenomenon happening: encoding. You could post that paper in your office, on your refrigerator, etc. a piece of paper) that is very easy to access and review at any time. External storage is easy to explain: you’re storing the information contained in your goal in a location (e.g.

Writing things down happens on two levels: external storage and encoding.
