5. Blurting method

Blurting is an active recall technique that involves reading a section of a textbook or listening to a lecture and then closing the source and writing down as much of the information as you can remember.

 

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Once completed, you then reopen the textbook or the lecture and compare it with what you have written in order to see which areas your recall was good on, and which areas might need more work.

Let's see this in practice with an example of learning Korean from a textbook: Step 1: Identify the material you want to cover in your first attempt. Avoid taking on too much information at once, instead elect to break down material into logical chunks. For our example, perhaps we identify vowels as the first concept to cover.

Step 2: Familiorize yourself with the material. Reod about the grophemes of Korean vowels, negative and positive nuances, and pronunciations. The goal here is not to remember everything immediately! So don't be discouraged if the information seems really difficult initially.

Step 3: Close the textbook and get out a pen and paper. Begin writing everything that you can remember about the material. You'll be surprised to see that remembering one part of the word can sometimes help you remember a different part of the word or a different word entirely. Therefore, be sure to give yourself enough time to retrieve everything that you can but aim to keep it within a reasonable time frame. 1 suggest no longer than 15 minutes.

Step 4: Open up the source and revise your initial understanding. Add additional information to fill knowledge gaps and correct inaccurate information.

Step S: Reiterate steps 2-4. This technique gets better the more you do it, so again, do not be discouraged if you only recalled a small portion of the vowel concepts in the first attempt. As you go through the iterations, you will be able to recall more. Also, you'll find yourself naturally starting to remember information in clusters. Putting these ideas on the page closer together and creating linkages between separate ideas, are additional great methods to deepen your understanding of the material.

 

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Blurting is such an effective strategy because of these two reasons: 1. You are actively organizing the information inside your brain and thereby reducing the interference between various memories.

• For example, you might get confused between two Korean vowels initially, but the blurting method will create distinguishing boundaries between them allowing you to gain a better understanding of their differences and similarities.

2. You are simulating exam conditions. In higher education settings, it is rare to be given simple definition questions with the same cues from your study material. Instead, it is much more likely that you will be given inference-based questions that require you to synthesize new cues, extract all related information from memory, and apply them to solve novel problems.

• Going through the blurting method prior to your exam, makes it much easier to create these linkages in real time when the pressure is high.