Information assimilation is a vital skill that comes in handy not only at school or college but throughout life. Without it, it’s impossible to imagine a person’s career growth, creative development, etc. Like all skills, learning is trainable, so if you had problems as a child, you do not need to give up on yourself.
By choosing the right methods and techniques from EssayAssistant, you can learn to memorize and understand much more than before. In our article, we will talk about these tools, as well as talk about the stages of information assimilation and the factors that influence this process.
The concept of and factors influencing the assimilation of information
For assimilation of the information arriving from the outside a work of all sense organs is necessary. After all, this process involves sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, as well as memory and thinking.
Factors on which the assimilation of information depends.
- Intellect. This is a property of man, which allows you to solve various problems in life, learn new things, adapt to changing conditions of existence.
- Life experience. A man gets it all the time, from birth, this process affects the family and society.
- The volume of information. Of course, its large and chaotic flows complicate the process of assimilation.
- Ways of thinking. You can think and reason stereotypically, according to a predetermined algorithm, without going beyond familiar schemes, when psychological automatisms are activated. But there is also another way of thinking – the non-standard one, with an attempt to look at an issue from different positions, to solve problems in a non-typical way, to go beyond the boundaries of the habitual.
- Inner attitudes. The rules according to which a person acts, his beliefs, moral guidelines.
- Selectivity of perception and the needs of the person. The process of assimilation of information directly affects the personal interest in a particular issue.
- Degree of interest, motivation. Perception depends on how a person is motivated to receive and comprehend it.
- Order in the so-called “Memory Archive.” “Memory Archive” or “My Story” is an energy-informational repository of received experiences, emotions ever experienced in the present and past lives of the human soul. If there is no order and structure in this repository, it will be more difficult to comprehend information.
Five stages of information assimilation
The works of the Soviet psychologist S.L. Rubinstein list the main levels of information assimilation, and there are five of them.
Perception
Firstly a person gets acquainted with new information by perceiving it with his/her senses – for example, with sight or hearing. The most essential points and key facts are highlighted and certain images are attached to them. This is the primary assimilation and form of cognition. The next step is making sense of the information.
Understanding
Here the person begins to think about what he has learned, compares the received information with what he already knows, tries to analyze and make generalizations. A link is made between the new knowledge and experience. The efficiency of assimilation of new data depends on the number of formed associations: the more of them – the better and the easier it is to apply knowledge in practice. But the lack of associations makes it difficult or even impossible for a person to assimilate the information.
Reproduction
The third stage is retrieval of knowledge from memory when the data is reconstructed in the form of an image of the object that has been perceived before. In the process of formulating thoughts, the new knowledge is more firmly fixed in the mind and memory. If we talk about learning, it is important to consider the need for independent reproduction of the material being learned.
Applying
For information to settle in the mind, a person must use it in everyday practice, solving common and new tasks and building skills.
Creativity
The efficiency of information assimilation can be called high when a person can not only reproduce the data, but also transform, improve them, and apply them in research activities.