HOW TO NURTURE LOVE FOR LEARNING

Ways to Enhance Learning and Make It More Enjoyable

Be Interested: Be absorbed in something, and you more readily learn it. The book Motivated Minds—Raising Children to Love Learning makes the following observation: “Researchers have shown decisively that when children study because they enjoy it, their learning is deeper, richer, and longer lasting. They are also more persistent, more creative, and more eager to do challenging work.”

Relate Learning to Life : Author and educator Richard L. Weaver II writes: “When there is a direct connection between classroom learning and your practical experience, there is an electrical spark that turns on the light bulb of understanding.”

Try to Comprehend: When people try to understand something, they stimulate both their thinking ability and their memory. Rote learning has its place, but it is no substitute for comprehension. Even the bible gives such admonition at proverbs “With all that you acquire, acquire understanding. Highly esteem it, and it will exalt you,”

Concentrate: “Concentration is at the very heart of learning,” explains the book Teaching Your Child Concentration. “[It] is so important that it has been called a fundamental prerequisite of intelligence and has even been equated with intelligence itself.” Concentration can be taught. A key is to start with brief periods of study and then lengthen them incrementally.

Paraphrase: “The most competent students are the ones who are the most proficient paraphrasers,” says Dr. Mel Levine in his book A Mind at a Time. Paraphrasing reduces information into smaller, manageable chunks, which are easier to remember. Good notetakers exploit this principle by not taking notes verbatim.

Associate: In The Brain Book, Peter Russell likens memories to hooks suspended on previous memories. In short, recall is enhanced when you clearly associate new things with what you already know. The more associations you make, the better the recall.

Visualize: Vivid images last. Therefore, visualize material where possible. Mnemonic experts use this technique, often creating exaggerated or humorous mental pictures as a memory aid.

Review: Within 24 hours we can forget up to 80 percent of what we studied. By doing a brief review after a study session, then again a day, a week, a month, and even six months later, we vastly improve our recall, even raising it to near 100 percent.