Priming in learning is a powerful and effective technique that can help you learn faster, easier, and better.
Priming your mind for what you are about to learn is a very important stage in studying because it can help you improve your learning outcomes and efficiency. Priming is a technique that involves exposing yourself to stimuli or information that are related to the topic you want to learn before you actually start learning it. This can activate your prior knowledge and associations, enhance memory and recall, increase interest and curiosity, and improve your understanding and comprehension.
The advantages of priming in learning:
- Speed up the processing and retrieval of information in memory by activating related associations or representations².
- Enhance the ability to recognize and categorize new variations of familiar things by exposing the brain to different stimuli that share common features².
- Prepare the brain for learning by stimulating the curiosity and prediction system, increasing attention and motivation to find answers⁵.
- Improve the learning outcomes by making the explicit teaching more effective and satisfying after the incidental exposure to the relevant concepts⁵.
Examples of priming in learning:
- A teacher wants to teach her students about the concept of fractions. Before the lesson, she shows them a video of a pizza being cut into equal slices and asks them to count how many slices there are. This primes the students to think about dividing a whole into parts related to the concept of fractions.
- A student wants to learn a new language. He listens to songs and podcasts in that language every day, even if he does not understand everything. This primes his brain to get familiar with the language’s sounds, rhythms, and patterns, which can help him learn it faster and easier.
- A student wants to learn about the concept of gravity. Before the lesson, he watched a video of an astronaut floating in space and a feather falling on the moon. This primes him to think about how gravity affects different objects and environments, which is related to the concept of gravity.
Priming is good for your learning
- Make your brain more receptive and ready to learn new information by activating the relevant prior knowledge and associations.
- Enhance your memory and recall by strengthening the neural connections and associations between the primed and learned information.
- Increase your interest and curiosity by creating a gap between what you know and what you want to know, motivating you to seek the answers.
- Improve your understanding and comprehension by providing you with a context and a framework to organize and integrate the new information.
Priming is a technique that can help you learn better by activating your prior knowledge and associations, enhancing your memory and recall, increasing your interest and curiosity, and improving your understanding and comprehension. Using priming, you can prepare your brain for learning new information and make integrating and remembering it easier.
Priming has many real-world applications as a learning and study aid for students and teachers. You can use different types of priming, such as images, words, sounds, or games, to stimulate your brain and create a context for the topic you want to learn. We encourage you to try priming yourself with some questions or images related to the topic you want to learn and then see how it affects your learning process and outcomes. You can also experiment with different types of priming and see what works best for you.
Sources
(1) Priming and the Psychology of Memory – Verywell Mind.
(2) Cognitively Priming Students for Learning | Edutopia.
(3) Priming the brain to learn | National Institutes of Health (NIH).
(4) Priming | Psychology Today.
(5) Priming as a Teaching Strategy: Definition & Examples.
