Organisation as a memory improvement technique.

By Syeda

What is organisation?

• Organisation is the act of methodically implementing a system into everyday tasks. Organising material makes it easy to remember. It has been proven that when we're learning something we often automatically organise the material in a way that makes it easier to remember.

• Organizing material hierarchically or in categories and subcategories can be particularly helpful. The way an outline is organized, for example, usually helps people to remember the material in it.

• Chunking material into segments is also helpful. People often remember long strings of numbers, such as social security numbers, by chunking them into two-, three-, or four-digit segments.

Research into the effectiveness of organisation.

For example, Jenkins and Russell (1952) studied the recall of word lists. The word lists contained words that were highly associated (e.g. knife and fork). They found that p's tended to the group associated words together in recall even though they'd been separated in the original presentation. So if 'knife' and 'fork' had been separated by other words in the original list, they'd be recalled together.

• Can you think about the evaluation of this study?

Research continued.

• TULVING (1962) repeatedly gave his p's a list of words to learn. He found that the ORDER of the p's recall became increasingly CONSISTENT- they were organising and chunking the material to be learnt into easily remember able groups. EG if the word list contained cat, daisy, sock, giraffe, shoe, scarf, dog and rose, it's likely that no matter what order they were presented in, the words would be group together in categories for recall- animals, clothes and flowers.

• Can this study be generalised to the general population?

Research criticising organisation

Deese - participants were presented with lists of associated words for example: thread, pin, eye, thimble, sewing, sharp. The participants were then asked to recall the words. Deese found that a non-presented word such as needle was recalled by a large proportion of participants because they had organised it into a group with the words that had been presented.

Evaluation of organisation as a memory improvement strategy.

• Memory