How To Best Learn New Information

Learning new skills is vital for anyone in today’s organizations.

Of great interest to people in a modern workplace, is how to learn new things. These days, we are all constantly learning new skills. If you’re not learning, you’re standing still — and if you’re standing still, you’re falling behind. How then, can you learn new things as quickly as possible and keep them in your memory? This question is also very relevant to people who teach or coach others.

What you basically want, is for information to go from sensory input, through the working memory, into the long-term memory — and then be retrievable at will. You need attention to get information from sensory input into working memory, and a process called encoding to get it into the long-term memory. What helps the encoding is what psychologists call elaboration or elaborative rehearsal — mainly deep thinking about the information. Deep thinking entails more than just repeating the information in your head. Elaboration is more about understanding information than memorizing it, and as it turns out, understanding information is the key to remembering information best. Thus, the approach of modern teaching is to make sure students understand the information, rather than simply being able to recall it.

— Understanding —