Science Headlines: Exams and Memory

Science Headlines: Exams and Memory

An information service for media in New Zealand

For more information you may contact any of the following scientists directly, email headlinescience@rsnz.org or call 04 470 5758.

7 November 2007

As students cram for exams, scientists comment here on the benefits of repetition, why where you study counts, the surprising effects of alcohol on memory, and whether exams are useful tests of learning at all.

1. Dr Mick Grimley, Educationalist, School of Educational Studies and Human Development, University of Canterbury
Phone: 03 364 2987 ext. 8117
Email: michael.grimley@canterbury.ac.nz

"People under stress experience a reduction in working memory - the type of memory that is functional when we store, manipulate and process information during conscious thought. Even though they are not consciously thinking about the things that are stressing them, their anxieties are there in the background, affecting how they perform.

"In times of high stress we can't always recall what we want to recall. For many students, exams are high stress situations. Their performance can be affected, and it's largely out of their control. Some people are just predisposed to suffer anxiety in these situations.

"How can we deal with it? Well, we can't increase working memory as this tends to be a fairly fixed attribute, but we can work to change the way we assess students, or find ways of reducing exam anxiety. Perhaps considering what exams actually achieve is the bigger issue here. Often students approach exams by learning by rote. Even if they recall facts in the exam room they often can't use them later in real world situations. We need to develop ways of optimising and assessing student learning so we know they're understanding the material at a deeper level. One way of doing this might be to observe students applying their knowledge in novel and real world situations. After all what's the point learning something if you can't apply it?”

2. Associate Professor Emmanuel Manalo, psychologist and Director of the Student Learning Centre at The University of Auckland
Phone: 09 373 7599 ext. 87896
Email: e.manalo@auckland.ac.nz

“I teach memory skills to students, and one of the principles of memory is that paying attention is absolutely necessary. Research on rats going through mazes shows that if they don’t pay attention they remember very little of the environment. So trying harder while studying is not enough. You really need something tangible to help you pay attention, like deciding exactly what you intend to get out of a study session before sitting down to study. That helps you know what to look out for and what you’ve achieved.

“Another important principle is practice – a mistake students make is that they think that the study process for examinations only involves putting information in, whereas it’s equally important to ensure effective access to that information. There are three stages to memory: encoding, storing and retrieving. But students often place the emphasis on the encoding and never think, ‘Can I, in the future, write about this or solve this?’

“A third principle is personalisation. A person might not be very good at school, but know absolutely everything there is to know about Star Trek, for example. That’s because the more they’re interested in it, the more they think about it, link it to things they are doing, and make it part of their life. So if you can take an interest in what you’re studying, you’re likely to remember things more easily.

“I’ve done research on mnemonics, or memory aids, which show that we do learn better when we can associate information with things we know. One study helped children remember and maintain simple maths procedures by giving them stories to associate with the task. But mnemonics can be time consuming and add an artificial dimension to memory. They should really only be used in situations where there is real difficulty in learning something.

“Recent memory research has also shown that – although it went out of fashion in the sixties and the seventies – repetition is important. Our brains have inhibiting chemicals that stop the neural growth associated with forming new memories, and it takes repetition to block the action of these inhibitors. They act like filters; if we didn’t have those inhibitors then everything we see and experience would be encoded into our memory. People who are good at remembering are better at that mental repetition.”

3. Dr Maggie Kalev, molecular biologist in the Department of Molecular Medicine and Pathology at The University of Auckland
Phone (work): 09 373 7599 ext. 84484
Email: m.kalev@auckland.ac.nz

“Making memories is a complex process involving different regions of the brain. It’s a balance between storing information and discarding information that’s undesirable or useless. How the brain regulates this is unclear. Several different brain receptors and their transmitters help to process information. One receptor, binding NMDA, is responsible for most of the excitatory signals to neurons, and it’s this neuronal excitability and related plasticity that is critical for memory.

“We’ve uncovered a surprising relationship between alcohol and memory. Surprisingly, we saw beneficial effects on memory when adult rats were given low doses of alcohol. This phenomenon required NMDA receptor expression. It seems that the brain, even the mature, adult brain, can respond to the challenge posed by drinking small amounts of alcohol. It mounts an adaptive protective response, in part by increasing the number of NMDA receptors. In fact, the brain overcompensates for the alcohol challenge, and memory actually improves.

“People often drink to forget traumatic experiences, but our results show that ‘drinking to drown sorrows’ is unlikely to be true. Rats drinking higher amounts of alcohol did not remember objects well but unexpectedly, negative emotional memories were enhanced at that time. We believe that this failure to forget traumatic experiences signifies a disturbed brain function. At the microscopic level, we saw damage to the brain tissue which underlines the toxicity of excessive drinking.

“Our study was conducted in rats over an eight week period and is certainly not a recommendation for a lifestyle of moderate drinking. However, this research does show that the mature brain is plastic, and can adapt, and even overcompensate in response to a challenge. We want to find out more about the mechanisms that the brain uses to protect itself. Mimicking such mechanisms by novel drugs could help preserve memories in patients with Alzheimer’s Disease, or prevent neuronal death following stroke or brain trauma.”

4. Associate Professor David Bilkey, a neuroscientist in the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago
Phone (work): 03 4797633
Email: dbilkey@psy.otago.ac.nz

“One of the things we study is the effect of context on how the brain represents places. We look at a particular kind of cell in the hippocampus – “place” cells which fire when you’re in a particular location. For example if I walk around my office, 1000 different cells might each fire in a different part of the office.

“If you look at people who spend enormous amounts of the day navigating through the environment – such as taxi drivers in London – then part of their hippocampus is bigger. And the longer they’ve been London taxi drivers, the bigger that part of their hippocampus is, suggesting that their place cells may have changed in some way.

“Although these place cells were first described about 30 years ago, there’s still an ongoing debate about how exactly these cells represent the environment, how they do something useful for the animal. Because of course you don’t just want to know where you are, but you also want to know what the important things around you are and how to get to them. Context may be an important part of this, because some things may be important in one context but not another.

“That’s not necessarily the kind of memory you use in exams to remember facts. But there are studies which have shown that the context that information is learnt in becomes part of the memory trace, such that it can serve as a cue to recalling that information at a later time. The classic study on this looked at people who learned information while scuba diving and found that their recall was better when they retrieved the information in the context that they learned it in. For example, if it was learned under water, then recall was better when tested underwater and vice versa. That’s an extreme example, but you can apply it to the exam situation. While it sounds really boring, exam study should be done at a desk in a quiet location, not in front of the TV because later on you’ll be asked to retrieve that information while seated in a quiet location.”

Science Headlines is a service managed by the Royal Society of New Zealand and funded by the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology.

ENDS

© Scoop Media