THESIS STATEMENT

Learning Strategies: The Most Effective Way for Freshmen Psychology Students of the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila

INTRODUCTION A. Background of the Study
The word “learning” is defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “the activity or process of gaining knowledge or skill by studying, practicing, being taught, or experiencing something”. The ability to learn is possessed by every human and animal. Learning is not done all at once but builds and shapes by what we already know. Also, learning is instinctive not mechanic. We don’t learn to “learn” but we do it naturally. It has been high wired into our personality since the time of our ancestors in an attempt for survival. From prehistoric cavemen to ever-curious toddlers, learning has been a big part of our life.

Memory plays an important role in all learning because it lets you store and retrieve the information that you learn. It is basically the record left by a learning process, thus, memory depends on learning. But some people have a hard time in that field. A new study led by Dartmouth’s Michele Tine, published in the Journal of Cognition and Development, found that “students in urban poverty performed at just below the 40th percentile in both verbal and spatial working memory, students in rural poverty performed better in verbal-memory tasks--at the 45th percentile--and significantly worse in visual-spatial working memory, at the 29th percentile,” the article notes. As stated before, if there is a problem in memory, then there is also a problem with learning.

To most people, including students studying in college and even professionals, learning something the “hard way” involves a waste of time, effort and energy. Gathering information should be innovatively made to fit the different learning styles of students and how they commit information to memory. Many common learning