As humans we strive for knowledge, this is the reason that learning if such a large part of out early lives. We base our survival of the ability to learn and use that information in our everyday lives. For us to learn something though, we have to get that information into are memory. Memory is the persistence of learning over time, through the encoding, storage and retrieval of information. As being a college student I rely heavily on memory because college is all about learning, and I need to be able to remember what I learn here at Penn State to better my future. Memory isn’t simple, and to get all of this information into my memory I need to encode the information. That way I will be able to recall that information when necessary.

There are many different types of encoding that we use to get information into are short term, and long term memory. As a high school student, I used maintenance rehearsal to encode information to my memory. It wasn’t until college that I realized this was a horrible way for someone to study, and retain information, because it is only putting that information into your short term memory. It was easy though in high school, because you could just cram all the information you needed to know that day before your exam, and just get by. But by using this process, the information that I had learned was only available in my memory for a short period of time, and not long after the exam I would hardly remember anything that I learned. When I got to college I learned that by doing this, I could manage for the exams, but when the finals came around, I would be trying to teach myself an entires semesters worth of information, since everything that I had learned had left my short term memory, and very little was transferred to my long-term memory.

By taking psych 100 this semester, I learned that elaborative rehearsal is a far greater way to study, and retain information, since you are making meaningful connections to the information that you are trying to learn. By doing this, you transfer a greater amount of information into your long term memory, and it makes it a lot better when you are trying to recall that information.