35 Psychological Tricks To Help You Learn Better

February 7th, 2014 14 Comments Features

psychology tricks


[Editor’s Note: If you’re interested in learning more about neuroeducation, check out our Learning Strategies interactive infographic.]

Below are 35 proven psychological phenomena that affect you and your students every day:

1. State-Dependent Recall

Definition: It is easiest to recall information when you are in a state similar to the one in which you initially learned the material.

Application: Urge your students to sit in the same room they studied in when they complete their take-home quiz. Let them listen to music when they complete their mid-term essays if they usually listen to it when they write.

2. The Fundamental Attribution Error

Definition: The tendency to overemphasize internal explanations for the behavior of others, while failing to take into account the power of the situation. The student who says, “Brian got an A on his English paper because he is smarter than I am” instead of “Brian got an A on his English because he visited the Writing Center before he turned it in” suffers from the Fundamental Attribution Error.

Application: Sometimes students need your help distinguishing between internal and external factors that affect academic performance.

Love learning? Inspire yourself with an online course in Education Support

3. Effort Justification/Change Bias

Definition: After an investment of effort in producing change, remembering one’s past performance as more difficult than it actually was, thereby inflating the perceived value of the result.

Application: Unfortunately, effort does not always correlate positively with performance. Students may be angry if they do not receive the grade they expect on an assignment that cost them a lot of time. In your comments, always mention the work you see even if it misses the mark.

4. Cognitive Dissonance

Definition: The feeling of psychological discomfort produced by the combined presence of two thoughts that do not follow from one another, often resulting in the adoption of beliefs that align with one’s actions but contradict the beliefs one held before the action was committed.

Application: F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” The world isn’t black or white, and neither is the mind. Share this wisdom with your students to promote critical thinking.

5. Chunking


Application: A great tool for students who must memorize long series of names, numbers, pictures, dates, terms, etc.

6. Positive Reinforcement

Definition: Positive reinforcement is a concept first described by psychologist B. F. Skinner in his theory of operant conditioning. Positive reinforcement is anything added that follows a behavior that makes it more likely that the behavior will occur again in the future. One of the easiest ways to remember this is to think of something being added to the situation.

Application: Bonus and extra credit assignments are some of the most basic examples of positive reinforcement. More nuanced techniques might include positive verbal feedback, class celebrations (but not reward competitions), or opportunities to contribute individually to the curriculum.

7. Spaced Repetition

Definition: A learning technique that incorporates increasing intervals of time between subsequent review of previously learned material in order to enhance retention. Proven to be significantly more effective than massed repetition (i.e. cramming).

Application: One of the most valuable things you can do to help students retain information is to hold weekly review sessions. Go over not only the main concepts presented in the past five days, but also touch on concepts covered multiple weeks or months ago.

8. Multi-modal learning

Definition: The more ways in which you learn something (visually, aurally, kinesthetically, verbally, etc.), the better you remember it. A key advantage of interdisciplinary courses and programs.

Application: Provide examples of major concepts in different modes. Use texts, videos, recordings, visual representations, and creative exercises to reinforce the material.

9. Declarative knowledge vs. procedural knowledge

Definition: Knowing “what” (facts) as opposed to knowing “how” (procedural knowledge).

Application: In college, it is downright difficult, if not impossible, to train complex cognitive skills in a single semester; yet look what most problem solving courses in the corporate training world are—a couple of hours, eight hours tops. We expect learners to transfer what they have learned in the classroom to the job, but all they have are a very few simple if/then statements to take back to the job. Keep in mind that teaching your students “what” is not the same as teaching them “how.”

10. The Method of Loci

Definition: A mnemonic device used in ancient Greek and Roman times wherein items to be remembered are mentally associated with specific physical locations. Examples include the various rooms of a house and paths through the forest.

Application: A great tool to help students memorize terms, related concepts, or anything else that can be “placed” as an image on a mental map.

11. Interacting images

Definition: An item is much more likely to be remembered if it is imagined as being actively involved with another item in some way rather than sitting there doing nothing. When items are intertwined or associated they are said to be interacting and they become a single chunk or whole in memory.

Application: It is far more difficult to remember concepts and definitions than it is to remember actions and descriptions. So, use the latter to trigger the former. If you are teaching your law students about double jeopardy, advise them to imagine someone robbing a bank, going to jail, then robbing the same bank again, free of conviction.

12. Dual Coding

Definition: The ability to code a stimulus two different ways increases the chance of remembering that item compared to if the stimulus was only coded one way. For example, say a person has stored the stimulus concept, “dog” as both the word ‘dog’ and as the image of a dog. When asked to recall the stimulus, the person can retrieve either the word or the image individually or both, simultaneously. If the word is recalled, the image of the dog is not lost and can still be retrieved at a later point in time.

Application: Never present students with lists of keywords and definitions without adding stimuli (or letting them add their own). They will be far more likely to recall the difference between sedimentary and igneous rocks if they associate the former with baking a layer cake and the latter with crystallizing caramel. Trust me – adding images reduces the effort needed to remember.

13. The immediate environment

Definition: Multiple studies have shown a dependence on context of one’s environment as an aid to recall specific items and events.

Application: Simply remembering what you were wearing when you learned the 1st amendment of the Constitution will help you recall the material later. Encourage students to use their immediate learning environment to build associations and boost memory.

14. Dichotic listening task

Definition: A useful way to study selective attention, this test involves different auditory stimuli presented directed into different ears over headphones. Participants are instructed to repeat aloud the words they hear in one ear while a different message is presented in the other ear. People do not recall the attended message well, and are generally able to report almost nothing about the content of the unattended message. In fact, a change from English to German goes unnoticed. Some things, however, such as the participant’s name being spoken (called ‘the cocktail effect’) and a switch from the voice of one gender to another, are noticed.

Application: It is not every day that students are asked to listen to two different streams of voice recordings at once, but they are asked regularly to process multiple messages at once—often to their own disadvantage. Requiring students to copy notes written on an overhead while you lecture, for instance, is a ridiculous habit that should have been phased out long ago. How can any teacher reasonably expect this to be effective?

15. Change Blindness

Definition: A psychological lack of attention unassociated with any defects or deficits. One famous Harvard study asked subjects to watch a short video of two groups of people (wearing black and white t-shirts) pass a basketball around. The subjects are told to either count the number of passes made by one of the teams or to keep count of bounce passes vs. aerial passes.

In different versions of the video, a woman walks through the scene carrying an umbrella or wearing a full gorilla suit. After watching the video the subjects are asked if they saw anything out of the ordinary take place. In most groups, 50% of the subjects did not report seeing the gorilla. The failure to perceive the change is attributed to the failure to attend to it while engaged in the difficult task of counting the number of passes of the ball.

Application: Unfortunately, human attention is not designed to absorb important facts just because they are important. When you are highlighting important definitions or differences between concepts—things that require considerable attention—don’t require your students to be doing anything else but listening to you speak. Otherwise, that “gorilla” you deem so pivotal in World War I will walk on by unnoticed, so to speak.

On the other hand, if you are reviewing familiar materials, multi-tasking is acceptable, since students have already captured the material at least partially in their long-term memory store.

16. Bottom-up and Top-down processing

Definition: Strategies of information processing and knowledge ordering. The top-down approach, also known as deductive reasoning, involves starting with the bigger picture and breaking it down into smaller segments in order to derive a theory. The bottom-up approach, also known as inductive reasoning, involves beginning with a small segment of information and growing into a more complex, bigger picture. The former uses known data first to form a perception; the latter uses incoming data from the environment first to form a perception.

Application: Be aware of the type of processing you are expecting when you assign a project or ask a question. Different fields require different types of processing: top-down is more prevalent in the sciences and bottom-up is more prevalent in the humanities. Try to phrase questions in terms of big picture first, small picture second or small picture first, big picture second.

17. Divided attention

Definition: Divided attention concerns our ability to ‘multitask’, i.e. whether we can attend to more than one task at a time. While the dichotic listening task involves trying to attend to only one message, in studies of divided attention the task is to attend to more than one source of information. Early studies have shown two important factors that determine our ability to multitask: 1) The similarity of the tasks. Allport et al. (1972) asked participants to learn a set of words while shadowing a spoken message. They found that the words could be learned when they were presented visually but not when they were presented as spoken words.

However, if messages were sufficiently different then both could be attended to. 2) How well practiced we are at the task. Spelke et al. (1976) found that, with practice, students could learn to read a story while writing down a list of words read out loud to them.

Application: Students should not be expected to arrive to class with well-honed multi-tasking skills, especially after a long vacation or break from studies. It’s best for instructors to ease students into tasks that involve divided attention.

18. Serial vs. parallel processing

Definition: Learning one object at a time, sequentially (serial processing), versus learning all of them at once (parallel processing).

Application: Cognitive psychology compares the processing of the human mind to the information processing of computers. Computers operate largely under a serial processing system, and the human mind has been shown to function more efficiently this way as well.

19. Incidental memory

Definition: Information acquired without intention, often just as memorable as information acquired with intention. Craik and Tulving demonstrated that it was not the intention to learn that was critical for later memory, but rather the type of processing engaged at the time of encoding. Information that was processed meaningfully was well remembered whether or not there was an intention to retain it.

Application: This is solid evidence that asking your students to “study hard” simply isn’t enough. You will have to present the information in a memorable way (using emotion, personalization, or any number of the tips listed here) or urge students to adopt effective memorization strategies.

20. Working Memory Capacity

Definition: Working (or short term) memory is generally considered to have a limit of about 7 elements, or chunks.

Application: Design your lesson plans around this number, and don’t expect your students to effectively process more terms or concepts than this in a given session.

21. Priming

Definition: An effect in which exposure to a stimulus influences a response to a later stimulus. For example, if a person reads a list of words including the word table, and is later asked to complete a word starting with tab, the probability that he or she will answer table is greater than if they had not been primed.

Application: Larry Ferlazzo uses priming with his students before tests, asking them to spend a few minutes writing on a topic covered in the quiz.

22. Schema

Definition: A way of organizing current knowledge that provides a framework for future understanding. Examples of schemata include academic rubrics, social schemas, stereotypes, social roles, world views, and archetypes. The brain automatically uses schema to process and understand new information more efficiently.

Application: The brain doesn’t remember facts; it remembers connections. In English and literature instruction, for example, urge students to make connections between the text at hand and their own lives, the text at hand and other texts they’ve read, and the text and the world around them.

23. Forgetting Curve

Definition: A graph that hypothesizes how information is lost over time when there is no attempt to retain it. A typical curve shows that humans tend to halve their memory of newly learned knowledge in a matter of days or weeks unless they consciously review the learned material.

Application: More cognitive evidence for spaced repetition and weekly reviews of learned material. Forgetting happens fast—don’t just review before the test!

24. Episodic vs. Semantic Memory

Definition: Episodic memory is recall for events (or episodes) that happened in the past; semantic memory is recall for specific facts. These two types of memory occur in different parts of the brain.

Application: Many people assume that recalling the name of the 13th president should be as easy as recalling how you learned to ride a bicycle. On the contrary, these types of memory operate very differently in the brain, and recalling anything that has personal value is much easier than recalling a random fact. Using episodic memory to enhance semantic memory can be a useful tool—much like interacting images and dual coding.

25. Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)

Definition: Psychologists in the 1980s found that attributes like self-restraint, persistence and self-awareness might actually be better predictors of a person’s life trajectory than standard academic measures. Now a movement is in the works across school districts to promote “emotional literacy” in students.

Application: Allow students to sort through their feelings about your class or subject with assignments that call for self-reflection. Although this technique is mostly geared towards children whose emotions are not yet fully developed, emotion affects learning at any age.

26. Metacognition


Application: Studies show that awareness of one’s learning is enough to enhance it. Help students step back and assess their own habits and skills.

27. Knowledge organization

Definition: The hierarchical method of organizing information and how it maps well onto the brain’s memory.

Application: One well-known example of knowledge organization is instructional scaffolding, wherein guidance is provided to novices until they begin to master the material, at which point the “scaffolding” is removed. This process compliments the hierarchical nature of learning.

28. Pattern recognition

Definition: Pattern recognition refers to the process of recognizing a set of stimuli arranged in a certain pattern that is characteristic of that set of stimuli. It does not occur instantly, although it does happen automatically and spontaneously. Pattern recognition is an innate ability of animals.

Application: Some types of recognition, such as facial recognition and pattern recognition, require large amounts of brain processing capacity. This is why the ability to make connections (or recognize patterns) has been linked time and time again to intelligence. The main systems our brains use to organize information (schemas, heuristics, etc.) rely on patterns. Point out patterns to your students as often as possible to promote critical thinking skills and heightened comprehension.

29. Anchoring


Application: To prevent this, promote delayed gratification and teach your students that the first reasonable answer presented is not always the right answer.

30. Choice-supportive bias

Definition: Remembering chosen options as having been better than rejected options.

Application: There is nothing wrong with changing your mind in light of new evidence. Students’ reasons for liking or disliking subjects are often based on experiences they can hardly remember or explain. Urge students to be open to new attitudes and critical of old ones.

31. Context Effect

Definition: The idea that cognition and memory are dependent on context, such that out-of-context memories are more difficult to retrieve than in-context memories (e.g. recall time and accuracy for a work-related memory will be lower at home, and vice versa).

Application: A close relative of state-dependent learning and priming. Providing the right context for a question or concept can make all the difference—more difference even than wording, tone of voice, or student mastery.

32. Primacy and Recency Effect

Definition: The finding that memory recall is higher for the first item(s) on a list and the last item(s) on a list.

Application: Present important concepts at the beginning of a lesson and at the end. Much of what’s in the middle will likely be lost, so you don’t want to deliver the main material you plan to test your students on then.

33. Verbatim Effect

Definition: That the “gist” of what someone has said is better remembered than the verbatim wording.

Application: Expecting students to remember the verbatim wording of an answer is asking too much in most cases. On the other hand, asking students to re-phrase important statements, events, or concepts in their own words greatly enhances the likelihood that they will recall the gist of what they need to learn.

34. Tip-of-the-Tongue phenomenon


Application: An extremely common phenomenon in any testing environment. “Blocking” can be reduced with many of the tricks mentioned above, including context, dual coding, chunking, and interacting images. Remember that all a student needs to recall a fact is the correct “retrieval cue.”

35. Heuristics

Definition: A heuristic is an experience-based technique that helps in problem solving, learning, and discovery. A heuristic method is particularly used to rapidly come to a solution that is hoped to be close to the best possible answer, or ‘optimal solution’. Heuristics are “rules of thumb”, educated guesses, intuitive judgments, or simply common sense. An example is the availability heuristic, a mental shortcut that occurs when people make judgments about the probability of events by the ease with which examples come to mind.

Application: As Doug Belshaw of Mozilla writes on his blog, “It can actually be damaging to 1) launch into using educational technologies without thinking them through properly (the how and not just the what); and 2) attempt to replicate what someone else has done elsewhere without thinking about the context.” Look before you leap, even if the leap seems quick and effective.



14 Responses

  1. SAY KENG LEE says:

    I reckon 35 tricks seem a bit overwhelming, and in reality, only 7 are critical for learning/studying smart, at least from the standpoint of easy implementation:

    ”chunking”, ”spaced repetition”, ”multi-modal learning”, ”loci method”; ”schema”, ”primary/recency effects”, and “heuristics”.

    I find some of the explanatory notes to be too abstract for leanring folks to grasp the essentials for immediate application.

    • Saga Briggs says:

      Thanks for the comment, Say Keng. We definitely delve deep into theory in this article… the hope is that educators will realize just how influential psychology can be in student learning, even if they can’t adopt every “trick” for immediate application.

  2. Alex Morris says:

    Another tremendous list, Saga. Well researched. I should have used these at university – the mindless repetition of reading things over and over was never very useful. Luckily I studied English Literature, which I love, so it wasn’t too much of a chore. The idea of playing classical music (“The Mozart Effect”) has long been a consideration for studying. You can play Beethoven’s 7th Symphony whilst you’re writing anything and it will seem like genius. Perhaps it works as a confidence booster, or to help with creativity. The brain’s such a complex thing.

  3. Moronke says:

    Thanks for the write up. I have recently developed an interest in Psychology.
    I will apply the spaced repetition this week on my students.

  4. The brain is much less known than you think

  5. Debra says:

    Even as a student this post has a lot of helpful information. Great read.

  6. Jason says:

    Great list I will be trying out these techniques. Thanks Saga!

  7. Thanks for sharing great info.

  8. Roger Singh says:

    It is a wonderful post. Thanks sharing more information….

  9. Hossen says:

    Great article. Thanks for sharing this.

  10. Jai says:

    It’s actually a nice and useful piece of information in very easy way. I am glad that you just shared this helpful info with us.

    Please keep us up to date like this. Thanks for sharing

  11. laura says:


Leave a Reply