Education

Tips For Better Cognitive Skills

Memory plays a crucial role in our daily life. It is a region that stores data about past events and guidance to plan future events. Have you ever wondered why this happened to you: You enter a hall and forget why you wanted to go there, or you cannot find your spectacles. You may be scared that you are losing your memory. But adding to the fact, everybody faces this at the certain age.

Compared to adults, the memory demand for school-age children is much higher. That is, as adults we have gained some amount of skills and knowledge that is required for the functioning of our day to day life, foreseeing technology that needs to be built on present knowledge.

On the other side, students are made to study about current and advanced knowledge without taking into an account of the student’s interest. So, an efficient and essential memory is a critical tool for school success.

Many students face memory problems. Yes, have you ever noticed a child facing a hard time in registering one bit of information while he is doing something else. A child may face difficulty in remembering instructions just delivered in the class or what he just read. This trouble indicates that the child may be facing some “working memory” issues.

For instance, when solving a quadratic equation, the student may understand the three-step instruction just delivered to them but while solving he may eventually forget the method to solve the second and the third step. So, in order to tackle this issue, beneath are some of the general strategies that offer aid to students to advance more effective and efficient memory.

Brain Training Games

Scientists have discovered many patterns of electrical impulses which can trigger a series of changes in the cognitive skills like learning, memory etc. Some complex puzzle problems act as “stimulant rich” environment which can trigger new ways by which a brain can solve a problem. They help in building new connections in the brain. Puzzles can be of any type such as crosswords, syllacrostics, acrostics, cryptograms and some picture related brain teasers. If one changes track from an easy level to a difficult one or some unfamiliar kind then it stimulates new neural activities, and develops a new skills to solve the higher level problems.

Visualization Skills

Students are benefited when instructions are given both in verbal and visual formats. Encourage students to imagine a picture of what they just heard or read. For instance, asking students of what needs to be done is also a simpler way to enhance memory of directions. To put in simple words, a student remembers the anatomy of human brain when it is expressed in both visual and verbal formats.

Over – Learning Material

In general, students often practice only until they are adept to perform one – error free repetition. Just one-time repetition will not do the needful. Students should be taught about the need for “overlearning “new information.

Teacher-prepared handouts prior to class lectures

Handouts or notes comprises of a brief outline of a work or studies that a student would complete during the lecture. Having given this information forehand helps students to identify the instructions that are given during the lectures and precisely organise the information in notes.

Chunk Information into smaller bites

Have you ever thought why security codes or numbers contain hyphens. It’s because it is easier to remember small bits of numbers rather than remembering a whole string of numbers. So while giving instructions to children remember to give it one at a time rather than giving multiple directions all at once.

These are a few steps that can be taken to have better cognitive skills and will help the students to retain their memory for much longer times.

Have a look at a video on Nucleus and see how virtualization will help to understand and retain a topic for a longer time and subscribe to Byju’s youtube channel for more such interesting videos.