The Art Behind Studying
Studying. None of us like doing it, yet we all know the benefits of doing so. There are many ways to refine your habits, as there's a formula to studying. Before you read make sure to establish a purpose of what you want to achieve and survey / skim / preview your material first. This way you can make a list of questions first to keep in mind while studying. While you are reading, read actively, taking notes on paper if possible. Focus on understanding all your concepts thoroughly, and take the time to read at your natural pace aloud. Additionally, take periodic breaks to review the content you have gone over. The forgetting curve demonstrates how you forget concepts over time if you do not review them, so you should make sure you review your concepts every few days and do some practice to keep them fresh. Try interleaved practice: mix problems, which will force you to learn more about how and why to apply specific formulas. When you practice one type of problem repeatedly, you get used to it and then forget the formula when learning something new. This helps you learn the way that you will encounter most often, in tests and real life. One note for your note taking, writing things over and over will help you remember them, but you have to write them in a different place / way every time as to not just copy.
There are a variety of proven ways of learning specific topics. Let's break them down into 7 different categories: practice testing, distributed practice, interleaved practice, elaborative interrogation and self-explanation, summarization, highlighting/underlining, and rereading.
Using provided quizzes, or coming up with your own practice tests for material can help to drastically increase your ability to retain information. By distributing your studying time over a given period time instead of having one long study session helps to recollect information in stressful environments a lot quicker. Coming up with your own explanations of a concept or theory can help in increasing the longevity that piece of information sticks with you. Summarization of your lecture notes, or creating your ow equation sheets will help in better grasping harder and more complex problems. Highlighting or underlining important part of your study material helps visualize the important parts of the topic at hand. Likewise, rereading material after the initial reading helps in recollecting information.
Organizing your materials and tasks according to Covey’s matrix will help in mastering your class subjects and prevent you from falling further and further behind. According to psychologists, ask “why” to everything, as this will help you get a deep understanding and gain background knowledge which will help you in related concepts. Practice and review your concepts every few days! You only need to do 15 minutes or so (5 minutes of key concepts, 10 minutes of practice). Do an hour of review every day, and you can learn up to 12 things at once! Follow these steps and you will find yourself on the steps of success.
