Do you guys know anything about memory based teaching?

[Tundro Walker]

I always found the following helped me learn:

1) interest in the subject (you learn what you're interested in more that what you're not interested in)

2) associative learning, IE: associate what you're learning to other things. Using Cellular Biology as an example, you can associate the Nucleus as Downtown or Civic Hall, Mitochondria are the Power Plants, and so forth. By associating new material to things you already know, you can easily pick it up since you're using an already-learned mental model to encapsulate a new one. Re-enforcement works of knowledge works.

3) Make it fun. Make a game out of it. Or use it to make a game. Get friends involved. (I think group study sessions try to do this, but folks just end up necking in the back room all the time...LOL!)

[Teg_Navanis]

Linking in to what seshomaru samma has said: You can confront your professor by saying that behaviouristic models of learning (de-contextualised attempts to create an association between the stimulus (question) and a specific reaction (correct answer) by repetition) are less effective than constructivist approaches, more demotivating and - even if you succeed in learning the stuff you're taught - often do only lead to inert knowledge (knowledge which you can express, but not apply). In Germany, we sometimes speak of the "Nürnberger Trichter", and I found a nice picture on Wikipedia.

I guess one of the major problems is that declarative knowledge is so much easier to test than procedural one. Isn't it convenient to give your students a list of answers/words they have to memorise and just ask them to reproduce those answers in the test, without having to worry about testing whether they can actually apply the knowledge?