Getting high quality information into your memory requires lots of hard work.

You have to think about things deeply to get them into memory successfully.

<aside> ❓ What does it mean to think deeply?

• take a moment and try to answer the question for yourself. </aside>

• If material is presented too clearly, students don't need to really think hard to follow, then they may not actually learn as much of the material as they would if they were challenged to teach themselves more of the material outside and during class - these are desirable difficulties.
• Some hard work may be frustrating, but it leads to better learning; the more you think for yourself in a learning situation, the better your memory for that information.

Generation effect: student generates information rather than having information presented to them by someone else

• generating information on your own ensures that you have actually understood the information that you are thinking about (self-explanations)

Self-explanation helps identify the gaps you have in your understanding of the way things work by generating an explanation

• helps to guarantee that your knowledge has no gaps
• helps solidify the connections across pieces of information.
• provides connections among ideas that allow them to be drawn out together
• reinforces the relationship between the information you are learning and the internal state of your memory.

A rich mental context

When you learn actively and work to repeat key information and produce explanations for yourself, you create a rich mental context in which you are learning.

Internal mental context consists of the thoughts you are having that relate to the material and the goals you have for learning about it. You make the information more strongly associated with your internal mental context rather than with transient aspects of the outer world.

High quality knowledge is more than a set of facts.

The more often you study the material, the better the chance that just one bit of the material becomes a trigger to remember the rest of it.

You will do a better job of building connections among components of your knowledge when you study over time.