Capital Research Publications

Wayz Press is an independent publisher with a special interest in memory and learning.

The Memory Key

by Dr Fiona McPherson

Dr McPherson's original memory book is available as a downloadable e-book, in PDF format

An updated edition of The Memory Key has also been published by Random House UK as Perfect Memory Training. This is available in both digital and print form from booksellers.

Planning to Remember: How to remember what you're doing & what you plan to do

by Fiona McPherson, PhD

Do you have problems remembering birthdays and anniversaries, appointments and errands? Do you sometimes find yourself in a room, and wonder why you’re there? Do you end up doing things twice because you’ve forgotten you’ve already done them?

Of all the memory failures that plague us, forgetting our intentions — birthdays, appointments, errands we mean to do — is the greatest, closely followed by those moments of absentmindedness when we lose track of what we’re doing. The special problem of these common memory failures is that they are failures that are often very obvious to others, causing embarrassment and regret in ourselves, and annoyance and hurt in others.

This book helps you understand and overcome these memory and attention failures.

As always with the Mempowered books, this fully referenced book, based on the work of cognitive researchers, helps you permanently improve your memory skills by explaining what you need to know to use these strategies effectively and appropriately.

Study skills: Effective notetaking

by Fiona McPherson, PhD

Being a successful student is far more about being a smart user of effective strategies than about being ‘smart’. In fact it is possible to predict how well a student will do simply on the basis of their use of study strategies. This workbook looks at the most important group of study strategies — taking notes. Notetaking encompasses many strategies, not simply the obvious ones such as how to format your notes, use headings and highlighting, how to summarize, how to review your notes, but also the more complex ones of how to evaluate text to work out which strategy is appropriate, and how to ask the right questions.

As always with the Mempowered books, this thorough (and fully referenced) workbook doesn’t re-hash the same tired advice that’s been peddled for so long, but is based on the last decades’ work of cognitive and educational researchers. Today we know a lot more detail about the ways in which text and images can be used to optimise learning, and this book aims to teach you how to use this information to become a better learner.

The book is aimed at university-level and adult students, and teachers.

Mnemonics for Study

by Fiona McPherson, PhD

Being a successful student is far more about being a smart user of effective strategies than about being ‘smart’. In fact it is possible to predict how well a student will do simply on the basis of their use of study strategies. While mnemonics do not help you understand your material, they do help you remember those many details you need to achieve expertise in a topic — details such as the names of things, technical words, lists of principles. Moreover, mnemonics can help you remember tags or labels that allow you to access clusters of meaningful information — for example, headings of a speech or main points for exam essays.

For both these reasons, mnemonics are a valuable assistance to building up expertise in a subject, as well as in helping you ‘cram’ for an exam. However, despite a number of studies showing the effectiveness of mnemonic strategies, these remain the least frequently used formal memory aid used by students. Perhaps the main reason for this is that their effectiveness is not intuitively obvious — truly, no one really believes that these ‘tricks’ can so remarkably improve memory until they try them for themselves.

While you can find basic information on the various mnemonic strategies in many books and websites, this concise book goes far beyond the same tired descriptions, using the latest research to explain exactly how these strategies work and are best used. The hardest part of permanently improving your memory is changing your habits and becoming an effective user of effective strategies. The best way to do this, research has shown, is through understanding how different strategies work, and when and how to use them. Through examples and exercises, that is what this book aims to teach you.

Catalogue

The Memory Key

by Dr Fiona McPherson

Table of Contents

Planning to Remember: How to remember what you're doing & what you plan to do

by Fiona McPherson, PhD

Table of Contents

Study skills: Effective notetaking

by Fiona McPherson, PhD

Table of Contents

Mnemonics for Study

by Fiona McPherson, PhD

Table of Contents