Arrange — prepare content for retention#

Once you’ve explored your material, you then need to work out how you are going to memorize what you’ve learned. As you can see in the text box on page 71, long-term learning needs to change your brain. Consider this step as preparing your material to help you change your brain.

Arranging involves three basic steps. The first is to analyze your content to understand the type of knowledge it is. This then helps you with the second step — choosing the techniques to use to reinforce and memorize that knowledge. Thirdly, you then prepare the content to suit the techniques you’ve selected.

This section describes these three steps — analyze, choose, and prepare. Like many other parts of Memletics, you can choose how much time to spend on arranging. Simpler learning objectives may not need much arranging. For important or complex learning objectives, you may need to understand this Arrange step in more detail.

Analyze Content #

  • An overview of what knowledge is (according to this book), and two knowledge types used to categorize your content.
  • Use the five knowledge storage types — facts, concepts and principles, sensory-motor skills, procedures, and higher-order skills (eg problem solving, decision-making, judgment, critical thinking, reflection, communication etc)
  • Use the three knowledge usage types — automatic knowledge, working knowledge, and supporting knowledge.
  • Use these knowledge types to analyze your content. How to break down your training material into chunks of content. Includes a table to help you assess your own content.
  • How to alter your rankings to account for exams and tests.

Choose your retention approach #

  • How to use the results from the first step to decide how to retain your content for the long term.

  • Use a table to help decide what to memories versus what to use an external reference for

  • How to choose techniques. Includes a comprehensive table that rates techniques according to the knowledge types. See the part of the table on the right.

  • How to vary your techniques for initial learning versus reinforcing, how to combine techniques, and how to use part task training and recombination approaches.

Prepare for Application #

  • Basic examples on how to prepare content for use with the various techniques.
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