Imagine yourself in one of those days in which you need to study and you need to productive, yet you’re too tired or unmotivated and need an impulse. Or perhaps your studying methods have been sucking lately and you haven’t been doing good lately.
Well, that’s me almost always. And I hate to look for tips online or in Youtube to end up seeing or reading tips like “get on your most comfortable clothes to study” or “highlight for remembering concepts” or “take away things that distract you” when I’m desesperate to find good advice, things that will make a difference on your studying quality,
So here are some random study tips that I’ve applying and that personally helped me. If they help you somehow on improving your studying and productivity, then I’d die in bliss.
It’s obvious that I didn’t invent them. These are tips the friends recommended me, that I read or heard on TED talks or that I simply applied naturally and realised later that someone else shared them to the world first.
So you’re ready for studying with tons of motivation and unicorn dust in your eyes. After 25 to 30 minutes your concentration starts to decrease. Is it normal ? Hell yes. The average student tends to be concentrated for that range of time and later, their efficency decreases. Solution: break your study sessions.
Have you ever heard about the Pomodoro technique? If you’ve been here for a while, it’s probably that you do. This is an example of breaking your study sessions after, usually, 25 minutes, taking then a 5 - 10 minute break to just distract yourself and then getting again into the studying.
Giving yourself a reward for concentrating 25 minutes on a subject or giving yourself the pleasure of distraction will not only help you regain energy to continue, but it’ll help you construct a studying habit and as you keep doing this, you’ll be able to study for longer but with efficency. And you’ll not die with a 4 hour straight study session and understanding nothing.
Taking good notes save lives. Fact.
Either if you use a computer or tablet, or prefer manual note taking (like I do, because there’s truly soooomething about writing everything in a paper that just helps me remember), you just have to give all your attention to the class.
Sometimes you don’t even have time to study well a topic or reading it properly but if you did give attention to the class, some triggers at a test could help you remember and take everything out.
Extra tips for good note taking:
>If your teacher explains a personal experience in which they applied what they’re teaching (not a personal life story), then write it down. I’ve had many experiences in which my teacher’s cases’ experiences have helped me much more on deciding what to do than theory itself.
>Compare your notes to some awesome friend or classmate that takes notes. Ya know, extra info.
>As soon as possible, go run to the teacher to clarify things that you didn’t understand or still had doubts.
>Add extra info right away. Most usual thing is that you gave so much attention to that class for the first time and forget about it as soon as it ended. Then boom, when studying for your finals you begin to remember the class that moment. In reality, It’s much better to keep that class alive while adding extra notes to what you just learned.
If I had passed (somehow) pharmacology and dental anatomy, it’s been thanks to this.
Summarizing has helped me be able to recognise what’s important of a lesson and what are things that I should remember or even memorise. And how have I’ve doing it? Writing it all on a adhesive note. I calculated the space I had to write down the most importand aspects of either an entire lesson or just a subheading, listing things that I had to know and graphics to help me remember. Later, when the exam was near I just had to look to my summary and right away, I’d remember it all.
On the other hand, teaching has helped me so much. We all have that one friend who has no clue about what’s going on, embrace that person and take advantage of how lost they are. Sometimes you don’t have to know all perfectly but just read a bit and then applying your knowledge on explaining it to someone. Make sure that your goal is to make that person have the same level of understanding that you have. It’ll help you not to only remember, but to truly understand the content.
It’s a great way of active studying because you’re making your brain recall all the information you’ve learn to summarize or make someone undersand it, and at the same time, you’ll be making sure that you’re truly understand the subject.
We’ve talked before of how studying actively forces your brain to go over information again But how is this so helpful? Making your studying active will make you more effective. So instead of memorising everything or reading endlessly until your mind catches everything perfectly, try to ask yourself what the hell are you studying. Make what you learn into something factible.
First, you need to understand if your studying facts or concepts.
Concepts include how things are working or what they’re really about. Imagine your studying phisiology: a concept will be about how the digestive system works and what are each organs functions. Once you understand how it works, you could just deduce in the future and will stay with you forever, you’re going to remember what is it about and it could help you remember facts.
Facts, on the other hand, are easily forgotten with time. And facts include, for example, what are the names of the organs that are part of the digestive system.
Understanding concepts first will help you deduce facts later. Putting concepts in your own words will make you remember them forever and ever.
Recollecting vs recognising
An example for this is highlighting. Now, making a proper highlighting technique has always been hard for me since I tend to get excited with it and end up highlighting everything (or almost everything) which is completely useless. A proper one is usually highlighting important terms or dates that will help you later remember everything.
Cons about it: You need a trigger. A date, a fact, a term, a word, anything that could make your brain explode and remember everything. That’s recognisition. You recognise that important thing of your notes or textbook and then remember. This is so dangerous since you depend on a certain little thing to remember concepts and personally, it almost never happens on the tests I’ve taken.
How to fight only recognising and to actually recall information? Test yourself while studying. Ask yourself tons of questions, play with images and understand concepts.
Don’t ever rely on just flashing terms. Not only for tests, but for actual life in which you’ll be using the information you’ve studying.
Remember that if you’re giving the effort to study something, you’re doing it to apply it later on your life. You’re making yourself fully understand how something works to build a criterion on the field you’re working on.
Good luck with your studying and I hope these tips were somehow help you or that I’ve explained the reasons why these could be helpful.
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