#teasconesstudy

Uni exams are finally over! Its been so awesome to have a chance to just read for enjoyment again, something I haven’t done in ages. I’ve been wanting to read Where She Went for the longest time. Also, got my new diary for next year!

Maths is a weird subject to study for. Notes and memorization just don’t seem to help that much, and as my main method of revision has always been writing notes, that’s a problem. Before I continue: Practice questions and past papers are probably always going to be the most effective way to study for maths. However, I have found the following study guide method to be super helpful in revision as a support to doing past papers.

The thing I found super hard about keeping on top of my maths revision is the fact that whilst I might have been on top of a particular topic when we originally studied it in March, by October I was struggling to remember formulae/methods for my exams. Making a personal study guide can help with that, not only because the process of making it serves as consolidation, but it’ll make revision that much quicker.

1. Get a notebook. The one I used came with dividers which were useful for dividing the book into topics and only cost a few dollars from Kmart.

2. Start by creating a heading with the name of the topic, or alternatively, as I did, just label a divider.

3. Write the question type. For example, in the main topic of Series and Sequence, you could group some of the questions into Finding the nth Term of an Arithmetic Series.

4. Write down any applicable formulae and explain them. For example, Tn=a+(n-1)d where a is the first term and d is the common difference. 5. Write down an example of each possible question type with a full solution. I often included ones straight from the textbook and if the question was a difficult one, I’d annotate the solution with tips for solving the question. Include any applicable diagrams which helped you solve the question.

I would recommend creating the guide as you learn the content - you could use it as a form of weekly revision to update your maths guide. Now, once revision comes around, you’ll have a concise revision guide with full solutions to the questions you found most difficult, without having to search through textbooks and class notes.

Oh and quick disclaimer - the photos I’ve included are of notes I took two years ago when I was doing year 12 maths and I haven’t checked if my solutions are accurate, it’s just as an example of how I used my notes :)

We’ve all heard it a million times (well, if you’ve been scrolling through the studyblr tag) - different ways of studying work for different people. For me, a combination of reading and writing have always helped me learn and retain things more than any other method. If you’ve ever taken a quiz to find out your learning style, you’ll probably have come across a few common ones, though the phrasing may be different: Visual, Aural/Auditory, Read/Write and Kinesthetic. A quick google search took me to one popular theory of learning, the VARK Modalities, from which these four categories are taken. This post will focus on revising if your learning style is like mine, strongly to the read/write category (with some tendency towards visual as well). My study tips follow, but if you wanted to read more about the theory/the other learning styles, I got my info from here.

Learning New Information

This applies to when you first learn things in class/lectures. 

If you’re learning from a textbook, read the assigned text in sections. After each section, copy the main points of the information down in as much detail as you need. So this isn’t a passive exercise but you are actually taking in and thinking about the information as you write, I would suggest avoiding listening to music whilst you do this, unless you definitely find music helps you (as with me I get totally distracted by music, especially if it has lyrics). 

Listening to a lecture. Okay, so this isn’t as tailored to a read/write learning style as the textbook method, but we can still make it work. If you are given materials to revise such as slides/assigned reading do it before you come to class. Then, when you are in the lecture, you will have already had a chance to acquaint yourself with the information via reading, and the lecture will be easier to understand. Whilst in the lecture take notes. Obviously, you don’t want to be distracted by writing down everything your teacher is saying, but if you are anything like me, chances are you aren’t going to remember detailed information simply by listening passively. So: take notes. This will help so much when revising! Do the same with any prerecorded lectures you watch/listen to.

Revising for Exams

The first dot point works best when you do it gradually over the semester i.e. as part of weekly revision.

Use the syllabus and learning objectives. Seriously. If you are doing your HSC especially, this is one of the best study tips I can offer. Find your learning objectives/syllabus dot points that apply to the material you are studying and summarize the notes you have already taken in order to comprehensively (but in only as much detail as needed) answer the question/statement in the syllabus. If you tend to be a little bit visual in your learning style as well, or if you are doing a subject (like science/economics) that is heavy in diagrams/graphs, include these in your notes as well. These will be the starting point for your final revision, and trust me, you will be so grateful that you made them. 

Final exam time? Use the notes you made in the above dot point to revise, Read them, annotate them, if you’re struggling to remember something rewrite them. Re-drawing is particularly great if you are struggling to remember a diagram/graph.

Summarize your summaries. Those summaries we made before, which are now complete with annotations/highlights from when we actively read them? Yep, they’re getting even more summarized. Try and do this from memory at first and supplement the summary with any forgotten details. This highlights what you already know/remember and what you don’t. 

A few things you really need to know, but just won’t stick in your head? One of the last parts of my study is to target those hard-to-remember things. I tend to grab a blank sheet of paper and write any formulae, diagrams and pieces of information I still can’t remember in it. This becomes my final revision page - something to read over whenever I get a chance right up until I get to the exam. For my HSC I laminated these and read them while I showered, but I admit that’s pretty intense. The HSC makes you a bit crazy like that.

If you didn’t manage to do any of the above and now its two days to the exam? Aka: my first year at uni. Yep, I had this happen more than I’d like to admit. If that’s you: Go somewhere with no distractions (I went to my uni library), bring water, food, a blank lined notebook and pens/pencils/highlighters and you’re textbook and lecture notes. We’re basically doing a super-rushed and intensive version of the first dot point. 1. Write down the learning objective. 2. Use textbook/lecture notes to answer the objective as best you can , only in the amount of detail that is necessary, and to the time constraints you have, as there’s no point knowing all there is to know about 1/3 of the content, and being clueless on the other 2/3.  3. If you have time, attempt dot points two and three.  Disclaimer: Whilst I have still found the last minute method pretty effective, there’s no way you’re going to know your stuff as well as you could if you’d been revising weekly (although I didn’t need to tell you that did I?).

Hope that helps out anyone who has a read/write learning style! There’s so much information out there as to what works for different learning styles, these are just the study methods I’ve found most effective for me over the past few years. Its all about working out what helps you most! If you have any study/school/uni/HSC questions my ask is always open.

My other study tips: What I learned about how to study in year 12.