Day 23: Learning Technique 10: Creating Associations

Today we discuss our learning technique #10, creating associations. The principle of association states that learning is enhanced by associating new information to what is already known. You will learn what this technique is, the science behind it, why you should use it, and finally how you can apply it to accelerate your learning.

Resources for this lesson:

• Transcripts
• Worksheet
• List of Scientific References

Summary

What is Creating Associations?

The principle of association states that learning is enhanced by associating new information to what is already known.

• Associations play a crucial role in organizing information when it's first encountered and then integrating it in existing knowledge to it will be retained.
• Associations provide cues that make information easy to retrieve

Why it matters: Associations may help to solve the problem of transfer, which means applying information that has learned to situations in work and daily life.

What does the science say?

Associations help you integrate what you're learning into your existing knowledge, making the information stick in your memory. [1]

• Although research thought of this as a paradox, the more you know about a topic, the easier it is to learn more about it.

Associations can help you to dig out information from memory when recalling it later.

Why should you use it?

You will remember things more easily and understand how concepts relate to one another.

• As a result, your will have a greater willingness to accept multiple perspectives, known as integrative complexity [2].
• When a challenging problem comes up, you will look for new ways to solve it because you have different associations and cues to draw on.
• You will avoid the einstellung effect, which refers to a person's predisposition to solve a given problem in a specific manner, even though there's a better or more appropriate method of solving the problem that exists.

How do you use it?

Learn foundational material first:

• When learning complex info, learning is enhanced when taking advantage of existing associations, providing the most basic material first and then integrating new info over time.
• Presenting foundational material first provides a backbone to which one can attach additional information, allowing an organized mental structure to be built up over time.

Use concept mapping:

• Concept mapping is an approach to organizing information showing how ideas and concepts to relate to one another.
• Create concept maps by writing down a few words with arrows, between them to show relationships.
• Note on facts vs concepts: Facts are explicit pieces of information that you could point out in your five sense reality such as names, dates, locations, things, etc..
• Concepts are broader things that start to associate these different facts to gain a more general sense of the properties of each of these facts.

Use stories or associative chaining:

• Stories are built on a series of interlocking causes and effects, associations between events, in order to create a plot.
• With stories you will you create larger chunks of information for storing in your long term
• Each part of the story  can be used to cue the next part when you're trying to later recall the material later.
• Stories use emotion which creates stronger links and associations in memory, making it easier to remember that story when queuing the associated emotion.

Exploiting appropriate examples:

• Human memory is designed to remember concrete information better than abstract information.
• Abstract ideas are hard to fully understand without examples, but examples must be memorable in part by being associated with prior information.
• Multiple examples of the same material must be associated with each other so that they can form a cluster that is associated with the material that you're learning.

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Activity

Create associations between the learning techniques we have already covered.

Think about how each learning technique relaters to one another, possibly by how they are performed or how they work in the brain and memory.

You could create a concept map relating all the techniques or create examples of each technique to from cluster of associated examples.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.