Terminology Heat Maps and Seed Terms

During the latter stages of studying for an IT exam, your study and review activities need to change. The activities need to exercise your brain, its memories, the relationships between concepts, to reorganize your understanding. In fact, using your primary and secondary study tools from the first 50%-75% of your journey towards passing an exam become not only less important but even a stumbling block to success.

Instead, use activities that use your brain only – no book, videos, notes – and think. Different activities force that. For instance, IT people love labs. But labs work well because they make your brain focus on the topic, retrieve what you know, interpret words and meaning and relationships between ideas, and so on. But any activity that does that helps you learn.

A Terminology Heat Map activity provides just enough structure to help you recall facts you know, connect those facts together, reorganize your memories, strengthen those memories, and prod your brain to wonder about topics you know you just do not quite remember. They can help a lot, and you can use it as a review tool with any topic and with any primary resource.

Before I write more about what to do, note that the activity matters; the finished heat map does not. The goal is to exercise your brain. The end product you see in front of you matters little. So, the activity works like this:

• Have your tools ready – start with pen and paper.
• Pick one seed term from something you learned earlier – 3-7 days earlier is optimal, but any term from any length of time since you learned it can work as well.
• Take 1-2 minutes. Write the seed term and then write as many related terms that come to mind when thinking about the seed term, making a list. Do not define or describe, just list terms, or use a short 3-4 word description if you cannot recall a term.
• Stop.
• On a new piece of paper, take 2-4 minutes to make a heat map with the terms in the list. You can add and remove terms.
• Stop.
• On the same piece of paper, take 2-4 minutes to review a course or book chapter about the topic to find any lists of terms (common in those study tools), and add those terms to your heat map.
• Stop. You’re done!

Once you get the process down, you can do these in 10-15 minutes (a design goal for these activities.) Do a couple of these a week throughout your course of study. What happens to your brain?

• Your brain learns best when you learn a new topic, then forget it a little, and then you interrupt the process of forgetting. Yes, a little forgetting is good. Term heat map activities help you focus for just enough time to review a topic and force your brain to interrupt the process of forgetting.
• You will not recall every term and relationship from your prior learning. That’s ok. Focusing on the topic area for a little while convinces your brain the topic is important – and it will subconsciously attempt to improve connections between the terms.
• With a stronger memory and organization of what you already learned handy in your brain, when learning future topics, you will be more effective.