For example, self-testing is an active study strategy that improves the intensity of studying and efficiency of learning. However, planning to spend hours on end self-testing is likely to cause you to become distracted and lose your attention. On the other hand, if you plan to quiz yourself on the course material for 45 minutes and then take a break, you are much more likely to maintain your attention and retain the information.
Furthermore, the shorter, more intense sessions will likely put the pressure on that is needed to prevent procrastination. Know where you study best. The silence of a library may not be the best place for you. You might find that you concentrate better with some background noise.
Some people find that listening to classical music while studying helps them concentrate, while others find this highly distracting. The point is that the silence of the library may be just as distracting or more than the noise of a gymnasium. Keep in mind that active studying is rarely silent as it often requires saying the material aloud. Working and re-working problems is important for technical courses e. Be able to explain the steps of the problems and why they work.
In technical courses, it is usually more important to work problems than read the text Newport, In class, write down in detail the practice problems demonstrated by the professor. Annotate each step and ask questions if you are confused.
At the very least, record the question and the answer even if you miss the steps. When preparing for tests, put together a large list of problems from the course materials and lectures. Work the problems and explain the steps and why they work Carrier, A significant amount of research indicates that multi-tasking does not improve efficiency and actually negatively affects results Junco, In order to study smarter, not harder, you will need to eliminate distractions during your study sessions.
Social media, web browsing, game playing, texting, etc. Research is clear that multi-tasking e. Eliminating the distractions will allow you to fully engage during your study sessions.
Use apps to help you set limits on the amount of time you can spend at certain sites during the day. Turn your phone off. Reward intensive studying with a social-media break but make sure you time your break! See our handout on managing technology for more tips and strategies. Find several places to study in and around campus and change up your space if you find that it is no longer a working space for you. Know when and where you study best. It may be that your focus at PM. Perhaps you are more productive at a coffee shop with background noise, or in the study lounge in your residence hall.
Perhaps when you study on your bed, you fall asleep. Have a variety of places in and around campus that are good study environments for you. Reviewing notes helps move material learned from short-term memory into long-term memory, which will help next time you have a big test.
Talk to teachers Teachers are there to help you do your best. Talk to your teacher and ask for clarification or extra help if you need it before your test. Taking the initiative to ask for help goes a long way with teachers! Designate a study area The best study spot is one that is quiet, well-lit, and in a low-traffic area.
Make sure there is a clear workspace to study and write on. Study in short bursts For every 30 minutes you study, take a short minute break to recharge. Short study sessions are more effective and help you make the most of your study time. Find out more about taking a study break that works. Simplify study notes Make studying less overwhelming by condensing notes from class. Underline or highlight key words.
Create visual aids like charts, story webs, mind maps, or outlines to organize and simplify information and help you remember better. In one study, Roediger and two other colleagues compared test results of students who reread material to two other groups. One group wrote questions about the material. The other group answered questions from someone else. Those who answered the questions did best.
Those who just reread the material did worst. Before big tests, her mom quizzed her on the material. For example, she might cover up the definitions in her notebook.
Then she tried to recall what each term meant. Such retrieval practice can help nearly everyone, Rawson and others showed in an August study in Learning and Instruction. This research included college students with an attention problem known as ADHD.
It stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Overall, retrieval helped students with ADHD and those without the disorder equally well. But really grill yourself and your friends, she says. She was part of a team that asked students to write one quiz question for each class period.
Students would then answer a question from another classmate. Preliminary data show that students did worse on tests afterward than when the daily quiz questions came from the teacher.
Teachers often dig deeper, she notes. Often, teachers ask students to compare and contrast ideas. That takes some critical thinking. That finding comes from a study by Kornell and others. Then focus on what you got wrong. On the flip side, checking the answers can make your study time more efficient.
You can then focus on where you need the most help. In fact, making mistakes can be a good thing, argues Stuart Firestein. Mistakes, he argues, are actually a primary key to learning. In many cases, it helps to mix up your self-testing. Drill yourself on different concepts. Psychologists call this interleaving. Actually, your tests usually will have questions mixed up, too. More importantly, interleaving can help you learn better.
Mix up your practice, and you now space the concepts apart. You can also see how concepts differ, form trends or fit together in some other way.
You could do lots of problems on the volume of a wedge. Then you could answer more batches of questions, with each set dealing with just one shape. Or, you could figure out the volume of a cone, followed by a wedge. Next you might find the volume for a half-cone or a spheroid. Then you can mix them up some more. You might even mix in some practice on addition or division. Rawson and others had groups of college students try each of those approaches.
A year earlier, Sana and others showed that interleaving can help students with both strong and weak working memory. Working memory lets you remember where you are in an activity, such as following a recipe. Pay attention to diagrams and graphs in your class materials, says Nebel. Conversely, he suggested students use active recall: closing the book and reciting everything they can remember up to that point to practice long-term memorization.
Named for its originator, German scientist Sebastian Leitner, the study method forces students to learn, through repetition, the material they know least well. The system involves moving cards with correctly answered questions further down a line of boxes and moving incorrectly answered cards back to the first box.
Thus, the cards in the first box are studied most frequently and the interval becomes greater as the student proceeds down the line, forcing her to review again and again the information she doesn't know.
Experts argue that the difference between "slow learners" and "quick studiers" is the way they study; for example, instead of memorizing, "quick learners" make connections between ideas.
Known as contextual learning, this process requires students to customize their own methods of learning, thus making connections that inspire all of the information to fall into place and make sense for them individually. Some students find that recording all information visually in one place such as on a sheet of paper or chalkboard can help to paint a fuller picture and aid their connections within the learning process.
From there, he developed a technique of deconstruction and reconstruction of ideas, in an effort to understand even the most complicated of concepts. To use this method and learn how to study effectively, first identify what you want to learn. Then, try explaining it as you would to a five-year-old. The Feynman method is ideal for using analogies to further illustrate your concept e. Research shows that students have better memory and recall abilities when they learn new information with the expectation of having to teach it to someone else.
This makes sense, as teachers are charged with not only learning information for themselves, but also with organizing key elements of said information to explain it clearly to others. Studies also suggest that students are more engaged and will instinctively seek out methods of recall and organization when expected to take on a "teacher" role.
Metacognition, or thinking about thinking, thrives on self-awareness. To achieve this, students need to be able to assess their level of skill and where they are in their studies, as well as monitor their emotional well-being around potentially stressful studying activities.
While the studying methods included above are strategic and focused, the tips below remind us that we can, in fact, "overdo it" when it comes to studying.
When you come to this fork in the road, keep in mind that a sharp onset of diminishing returns during "overlearning.
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