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At this point in the year, you are overwhelmed with course work, overloaded by information in all your different modules that you have to somehow keep in your head until at least after the exams. There are probably times when you want to throw the whole lot out the window. After all, why does it matter? Why should you work so hard to learn all this stuff? Where does it fit in to your life, apart from getting you closer to that very important degree certificate?
A somewhat forced term, “sense-making”, can perhaps help you answer those questions while making the learning slightly easier.
“Sense-making” is the process of creating understanding from information and experience. It’s what we do when we take raw facts, events, or data and interpret them so we can act, decide, or learn. For example, you see a car approaching fast. You hear the brakes screeching. You hear people shouting. You see a child stepping off the sidewalk. You grab her and shove her out of the way. In a split second, your brain has made sense of all the data it received, interpreting it through the lens of your own knowledge and experience so that you could act.
The term comes from organisational and communication theory, especially the work of Karl Weick, an American scholar who first used it in the 1970s and ‘80s to understand how people in big organisations deal with change. Over time, the idea spread into other fields, like education. For students, it boils down to understanding, not just memorising. It’s what happens when your brain moves from “I’ve read this” to “I actually see how it fits with what I know already, both in my coursework and in my life experience.”
Here are a few pointers to help you do it.
As you’re studying, constantly look for meaning in the information you’re learning.
Ask yourself:
- What does this mean?
- How does it fit with what I already know?
- Why does it matter in this topic or field?
Say you’re studying financial management. Think of someone you know who bakes cookies to earn some cash. She starts off with say R100. That’s the owner’s equity. She buys ingredients. That’s expenditure. She needs to borrow a large pan to make the first batch. That pan is now a liability – she owes it to someone else, who wants some of the cookies as payment for the loan. That’s interest. How many cookies must she sell, at what price, to have enough profit for another batch? You can immediately see how the theory plays out in real life.
(Another example could be to look at the money plan in the GRAD toolkit and consider your own situation: what are your assets and your liabilities? What does your cash flow look like? That will make the theory real!)
In literature, does the main character in a play you’re studying remind you of someone you know? Do you like that person? Why/why not? How does that fit with the character in the play?
If you’re studying analysis and design in civil engineering, find a good image of a bridge over a river or a highway, and look at it carefully. How does it stay up? Is it supported from below, or does it hang from cables? How many? How widely spaced? If the concrete mix was wrong and it started crumbling, how would that play out? (I am not an engineer. You will know what the questions should be.) Connect the theory in your text book with something you see in the world around you.
Look for patterns and relationships between content in different sections or even in different subjects. What you learn in psychology or sociology may find an illustration in literature; law and financial management often overlap. You may read in the news about someone being declared bankrupt. Does your study content help you understand how that happened? The finance students probably don’t do literature, but Charles Dickens’ character Mr Micawber understood these principles perfectly: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence (£19.95), result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds and six (£20.05), result misery.” (Read David Copperfield over the holidays, you won’t be sorry.)
Test your understanding as you go along. Explain the concept in your own words, out loud, to a friend, or simply to the tree outside the window. If you can’t explain it clearly, you brain hasn’t fully organised the information yet. Go back, look at it again.
The good news is that sense-making accepts confusion as part of learning. When something doesn’t click, identify exactly where the problem is and work to resolve it. Ask questions (you can use AI to help you), reread the material, think of examples. Struggle is not failure, it’s part of the process.
It comes down to seeing everything you learn as part of a bigger whole, never as a free-standing piece of new knowledge with no connection to anything else. If you connect it with other information you know, whether in your course work or your life in general, you will remember it better and it can act to broaden your mind and your understanding for the rest of your life.
Happy studying!
The GRAD team
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