Does understanding make you memorise?

When you understand information does it help you remember the info? When I memorise I spend too long trying to remember all the details for economics and psychology a level. How do you guys remember your notes?

Understanding sure as hell helps. It's the first step to revising: you understand, then you memorise and then do practise papers. If you understand it then A. you can answer the more difficult questions that require more than simple recall and B. you can link multiple things together. So in class I always ask as many questions as much as possible to ensure I truly understand it, or ask my classmates to explain or even watch YT vids. Tests (maybe not GCSEs) are designed to test your understanding of a topic, after all. My teachers always said memorising the text books gets you to like a C-B. I'm not too sure about your specific subjects, though
Good luck!

Here's one of the techniques I use to remember quite long pieces of information and condense it smaller and smaller on each go of rememberance:

A) On a large piece of A3 paper, draw a spider diagram of everything on that topic (if you want to go from A-B, try and go clockwise around the spider diagram so that the information still stays cohesive when it gets condensed later on)

B) Now, once you've done that - learn the information you've written by reading it back to yourself or to someone and precisely what has been written down - that's how your mind will be trained to think for that topic.

C) Here's where the condensing begins - get a A4 sheet and now shorten that spider diagram that you made on the A3 sheet. This time, try to create mnemonics, acronyms and small diagrams to help you rapidly think during your exam - that way, your mind compresses the complex knowledge in a simpler manner.

D) Once you've done that stage, now learn it back again and try to imbibe the acronyms and mnemonics that you've learnt and those small diagrams - the art of compressing will allow you to recall complex information from smaller, bitesized forms of the information you are trying to learn and it improves your knowledge retention and improves memory 😊

If you want more techniques then feel free to PM me anytime and I'll speak to you later 😊

Ciao!

When you understand information does it help you remember the info? When I memorise I spend too long trying to remember all the details for economics and psychology a level. How do you guys remember your notes?