Everyone has a favorite way of recollecting information. These are identified as "Learning Styles", and some of them relate to or are described as methods of "Neuro-Linguistic Programming" (NLP). And even though NLP is the subject of activate debate with regards to its scientific validity, some of the tools and techniques it references are popular amongst learners and teachers.
For instance, Representational Systems are often mentioned:
- Some people are visual (you have a mental image of the information in the way you first saw it, or in a form that makes sense to you),
- some are auditive (you have an auditory image of the information you heard, or hear a voice read out loud an information you may have read),
In my case, I'm a visual learner. I've noticed early on in middle-school that it worked best for me, so the most efficient way to learn and remember something was for me to write it down and then to visualize my hand-writing and to use visual guides. Just like your eyes will notice things out of the ordinary or large objects, it's easier to try to remember big titles in an outline first and to then try to focus on the next items.
Note: Some theories surmise that there are "eye accessing cues" which can help to identify a person's favored representational approach: we look a specific way when we resort to one of the representational system.
I've also noticed that there's a "hierarchy" in my learning. I'll resort to visual thoughts first to gather the grand lines, and then if I struggle I can summon the details with the help of auditory thoughts. It may vary from an individual to another.
Of course it depends greatly on the subject matter as well: obviously, trying to learn something visually when it's an auditory skill won't be so great - e.g. pronunciation in a foreign language.
Memory is a strange thing: it's often easier and more effective to jump through various hoops to reach the right information than to obsessively attempt to fetch the right data directly. Your brain isn't like a bank, you don't just go to the ATM and ask to get your account status. You
Optimize Your Learning
Maximize Your Retention
While this information has now been often debated and considered overly wrong, there is some level of truth to it, especially when combined with the representational systems I mentioned above. There are methods of learning that are more efficient than others, and the general wisdom (or here, misconception) for a while was that you remember:
- 10% of what you read,
- 20% of what you see,
- 30% of what you hear,
- 50% of what you hear AND see,
- 70% of what you take part in,
- 90% of what you do yourself.
However, though this has been generally debunked and contradicts my personal experience (as I'm a visual learner), it's generally agreed upon that combining several of these techniques will indeed maximize your retention.
So, take the time to:
- rewrite your slides,
- summarize them as notes,
- read the notes out loud,
- re-draw diagrams and figures,
Anything that maps to a representation that your mind will be able to recall is good.
Hack Your Retention
Of course, you won't recall everything you've ever done, seen, or read just once. Or at least not the details. You won't read "War and Peace" and be able to recite it in 10 years, yet alone the next day.
Some things will stick to your short-term memory be easy to recall, others will be saved to a long-term memory and be harder to recall (schematizing here, as the short-term/long-term hypotheses have also been the source of fierce debates lately).
So, you want to make sure that you commit things to memory effectively. Sometimes that means you want something to be learned and remembered for a life-time, and other times you want to cram and get these facts and figures into your head just to pass an exam. (Which is also a reason why fixed examinations mostly suck... but I digress...)
An apparently effective technique that's become very popular lately is that of Spaced Repetition:
Spaced repetition is a learning technique that incorporates increasing intervals of time between subsequent review of previously learned material in order to exploit the psychological spacing effect. - From Wikipedia's article on Spaced Repetition
The principle of repetition itself has been known for a long time, and is the basis for many basic learning methods in school systems (writing lines, repeating poems 7+ times to remember them, etc...), but it's only later that attention was given to the intervals to be observed between the repetition to maximize their effectiveness.
Nowadays, spaced-repetition is used by many learning software solution, from language teaching software to flash-cards system (e.g. Anki and AnkiDroid). They rely on the spacing effect and empirical studies on the forgetting curve to fine-graine your repition based on your feedback: depending on how well your remember an element of data, the next repetition will be timed sooner or later.
Reuse Other People's Efforts
As for many things, sometimes the best effort you can make is to piggy-back on someone else's effort. As you mentioned, you don't really have that much time to spend to fill-in information to learning software, or maybe to re-write your slides N times. So you may want to look for people who passed the same examinations and who are your best assets as they:
- know what are the questions likely to be asked,
- know what their own mistakes were in learning and in passing previous exams.
It's Not One-Size-Fits-All / Additional Reading
As mentioned above, some learning techniques apply best to some people and some problems only. Make sure to identify what's best for your case.
For more details, I recommend these articles:
Notes On Your Particular Case
As you point out that comprehension is not a priority in your situation and that it's more the amount and the fidelity of the information retention that matters, my recommendations would be to:
- use a flashcard software to memorize bullet points (or simply your slide reader, but a flashcard software with spaced repetition support would probably help you more),
- re-write slides down one by one at least once,
- read the slides out loud,
- if possible, record yourself reading the slides out loud and listen to them while doing something else (watching TV, eating breakfast, running, etc...),
- summarize the slides (even if you feel this won't help to remember the exact wording of a slide, it's a shortcut for your memory),
- run through practice and test sessions with partners,
- SLEEP and do some SPORTS (it's very important for your brain's relief and oxygenation),
- do take some time off for menial tasks or idle chit-chat and relaxation with friends.
Quizzing yourself and having someone else quizz you will help a great deal. Also, considering this is likely to be an automated or computer-assisted test, maybe you could find a way to have a program automatically quiz you.
Being rested and giving your brain enough time to wind-down will also be important to optimize your learning. Sometimes it's better to learn something well than to cram too many confused thoughts into the box.