I think a lot of students have at least tried the urban legend of sleeping with opened books at pillows, especially when cramming for an exam as if to pick up concepts through direct osmosis from paper to the brain. I’ve tried that too out of desperation. I had exam after exam piling up during the semestral exams in high school and I ran out of time cramming for our Calculus exam. So I propped up Leithold’s big thick book and slept. Of course, I didn’t do well during the exam.
The information processing theory mentioned that as individual grows, their capacity and speed to process information also grows. As I got older, my study habits also changed. Gone were cramming during finals week. Instead, I developed the habit of listening to the teachers and taking notes in class. In that way, I retained information better and studying for finals simply became a review of sorts. My classmates also taught me how to do speed-reading. While I don’t think I am doing it right, I must say how I do it works for me. Since I am a visual learner, I make mini-schema’s of concepts that I am studying. Though honestly, I can only do that when I have much time on my hands.
Schema’s are something that I am familiar with due to my work. My work involves a lot of analytical work at fast speeds. Talk about thinking on your feet when you’re in a meeting with partners, your boss (es), and community stakeholders. Being in development work, designing a project involves crucial processes and tools such as coming up with a project framework. In particular, because of the framework approach in analyzing problems and developing corresponding solutions, our thinking is now more “framed”, wherein our learning and understanding becomes more process oriented.
However though, with different schema’s to think about at work (and for class), my mind is now a bundle of schemas!
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