#study skills

Summer in grad school looks a lot like fall and winter in grad school, just with a lot more sunshine☀️

Day 22 💽

December 17, 2022

Originally posted in the Nonfiction Addiction community.

Active reading — highlighting, questioning, summarizing — can boost retention by up to 80%. Reading isn’t just seeing words; it’s a conversation with the text.

What’s your #1 reading hack?

This fact and many more interesting things about effective reading can be found in: How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Van Doren

Enjoy fun, random, interesting knowledge or have some of your own to share, join the Nonfiction Addiction Community.

my college notebook: a big book with everything in it. 

in my final year of undergraduate, I really settled into my ideal organization and notetaking schemes. Here is a page of notes from my permaculture class on stormwater management tools, alongside my work scheduler (on a slow week. :P) I like this layout for  keeping my courses organized; course numbers run along the top edge, days of the week on the vertical. Because it’s just a grid, you don’t have to start on any particular day or keep the order of a calendar. Shaded boxes mark the days that I have that class, and I write tasks in based on when I need to work on them or when they are due. Underneath the chart is just a list of all the work that was due during the given time for each course. 

The notebook is the magnificent Leuchtturm1917 A4+ grid book, which has extra thick 100gsm paper. I took all of my notes and planned many projects in these books, using 1 per semester for all of my work. they are expensive, but the pages are huge, and it feels really good to write in them. Aside from class notes, I’d recommend these books for sketchbooks or for design project planning. 

in my Psychology class we had a class on study skills and basically I just learned the official names for different study skills like

chunking - splitting up a big topic into smaller topics

interleaving - studying in between other things like study for a while then work on an essay then study again

elaboration - learning more about the topic and applying it to daily life

overlearning - studying after you're confident in the subject

retrieval - memory practice basically

distributed practice - studying on multiple days

Anyway, I've never really had to study to get good grades but I've been making an effort to do so recently cause everyone's always saying the classes will get harder and you will need to study. I've had trouble with that though cause I have no motivation to study. I end up getting an A without studying so why would I study it doesn't make sense to me.

Then I realized that a lot of these study skills are things I automatically do. Just cause my ADHD makes it so my internal monologue/s are always running and they usually end up being about things I've learned or done recently and that includes classwork. So I automatically end up doing all of these things cause that's just how my brain works.