By the end of this section, I hope you will be better-able to:

• describe the important stages in the way you learn.
  
  
• take opportunities to improve the learning processes which most influence your success at university.
  
  

You've been learning all your life, of course. You've actually been doing it rather well to be at university at all! Congratulations so far. The question remains: ''Will your existing study methods cope with the demands now facing you?'' Or, to put it another way: "Is it possible to make your studying more efficient and more effective, so that you not only guarantee your success, but also you have more time available to do all the other things that you'd like to?" Psychologists have divided "the learning process" into seven steps. You'll recognise some of these. You can gain a lot of control over some (but not all) of them. Look down the names of the steps below, see if you can indicate which are the crucial ones, and why. Recognition Assimilation Inter Integration Intra Integration Retention Recall Communication What do you make of this lot? Let's take the first four together or rather let's choose not to say much about them! Why not? Because I don't think there's very much we can do about these steps. The first four steps are pretty well automatic. Can you sit and deliberately, consciously "assimilate" for half-an-hour, for example? I certainly can't. So, since we don't seem to have much control over these steps, let's leave them to look after themselves, and go on to explore the last three steps in turn.

What does this mean? " Getting things to stick" may be a reasonable way of defining retention. Have you had problems getting things to stick? Some things seem easy to learn, but others are much less easy. It may take many attempts before some difficult concept or idea begins to make sense. However, the good news is that we can do a lot about helping things to stick-more about this before long.

You may think that having mastered through to the "retention" step, you're home and dry as far as learning something is concerned. However, the "recall" step can still let you down. Have you ever sat at an exam desk, trying hard to get something to come back into your mind, yet it evaded you? Probably, soon after the exam you remembered it again. In fact it was there all the time; the only problem was that you couldn't get it back when you needed it. That's typical of recall problems. So, we've got to find ways of making recall safer, surer, more dependable. Again, there's good news - there's a lot we can do to help the recall process.

If you've retained something, then successfully recalled it on demand when needed, you still need to show that you've learned it. "Communication" is to do with expressing your knowledge, proving to someone else that your learning has been successful. It's to do with "giving it back", in the form that will score maximum credit for you. It's to do with getting all the marks you deserve in exams, for example. To sum up, however complex psychologists may make the learning process, in practical terms the three most controllable stages can be described very simply:

• Getting things to stick
  
  
• Getting them back when you need them
  
  
• Being able to express your knowledge.

We'll tackle each of these in various parts of this series of study skills guide. The study skills guide on "Making Learning Tools" goes into a number of ways of making sure that the retention and recall steps don't let you down. The study skills guide on "" focuses on the business of communicating what you know.