Is it time to make changes in your study strategies? Try an evidenced-based strategies for studying.
PROS-
You'll feel more confident and less stressed going into a test/exam (BONUS!).
You can share one of the strategies with a friend.The strategy may help you study in other classes.You'll like the improvement in your grades.You're adding tools to your academic toolbox.When you find the strategy worked for you, you'll likely use it again.You decided to make the change...no one else. You'll be able to articulate what you did differently. You're practicing an open mindset by being open to trying something different.CONS-
There are none.We all want quick answers to this big question, but while there is no quick fix, there are some best responses!
Retrieval Practice! Stop Multitasking!
Ways to do retrieval practice:
Make up a practice test or quiz!
Flashcard shuffle (on the MAC website)!
You and a friend can quiz each other!
Teach the content to someone!
Study the content as a 'story with details'!
Summarize your notes!
Mind-Mapping! (on the MAC website)!
Say it out loud! Self-talk rehearsal!
Need help with note-taking? Have questions about the ways to do Retrieval Practice? Ask us! Come to the MAC!
What did you do that helped you learn? What will you do differently from here on out?
Read more from the original article here.
To get the most out of studying with a Partner, follow these guidelines:
Be Prepared. Each partner should have a set of rewritten notes and should read them before getting together. When reading your notes and assigned reading material beforehand, think of any areas you are missing, any concepts you don’t understand, and any concepts you think are especially important. COme to the study session prepared to give, instruct, and clarify points with your partner.
Teach Each Other. If you can teach something, you know it.
Set Time Limits For Your Sessions. Set a start and end time for each session. Take adequate breaks and minimize lengthy chats off topic. Use the Pomodoro Method of Studying; 25 minutes of studying with a 5 minute break.
Take Turns. Once you and your partner discuss what your goal is for the session, and have a good set of notes and questions, take turns reading aloud, reviewing, and asking each other questions. If questions arise, try to answer them quickly. If you can’t answer them, jot down the question, and move on (ask the teacher to clarify). Get through the material once quickly, and then decide what needs more work.
Create Your Own Test Questions. Devise questions as you go along. Write down any questions you are not able to answer.
Recap And Review. After covering the material, clarifying with the teacher, make a list of main points and review them.
Move On If It Isn’t Working. If your sessions aren’t as productive and you’d like them to be and you don’t see a way to improve them, it’s time to find a new study partner.
Watch for a list of best practices for studying. When you study, you want to study actively. Active studying means you take an active role in the preparation, not a passive role. Students fall for passive study methods because they take less effort. If you want to ace the test, you have to study actively.
It matters how you study! When preparing for tests, quizzes, or any other assessment, your study methods should create durable memory. To do so, you must use RECALL memory strategies. Watch the video above to understand more about the difference between RECOGNITION and RECALL memory. Then, apply it to use only RECALL strategies when you study!
Watch the video to the left to learn cognitive science about how to make durable memory. Instead of rereading notes, (simply recognition memory), these three strategies are proven to create durable memory.
Another cool way to see the importance of creating a pathway in your brain as you learn new information.
Dr. Willingham responds to this debate!
How many of these 9 Best Scientific Study Tips do you already practice?
If you made flashcards, you have probably rehearsed them to make sure you can recall each term. To dig deeper: shuffle your cards, deal yourself three cards, and then WRITE sentences for how those three terms are CONNECTED.
For example, I may have dealt myself the cards: Global Warming, Weather, and CO2. If I dig, I will see that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. When it increases in our atmosphere, it causes a temperature rise. This results in Global Warming. Global Warming has many detrimental impacts including crazy weather, like hurricanes, tsunamis, and tornadoes. These three terms are definitely connected in a causal relationship. See Flashcard Shuffle doc here: Flashcard Shuffle Strategy.docx
The key to learning information is to process information on a deeper level. Dr. Chew warned about student's temptation to simply memorize information. This results in a shallow understanding. Here, he explains how to dig deeper using 1) Elaboration, 2) Distinctiveness, 3) Personal Experience, 4) Appropriate Retrieval and Application, as well as 5) Automaticity and 6) Overlearning.
Tips to help make memory stick and make the learning process quicker.
Preview/Review
Previewing and reviewing tells you where you’ve been and where you are going. Getting an overview before diving into a subject and summarizing are two principles that frame the ‘big picture’. If you practice reading summaries and skimming the material as you begin, you’ll know what to expect during a study session. Take a few minutes after you study to write down what you have learned-this practice will reinforce your understanding.The Cornell note-taking template is a good example of note-taking organization and summarizing material. Go to https://sites.google.com/marist.com/big-mac/home and click on Note-taking skills.
Test Making
Make up test questions during and after studying. By doing this, you learn to pick out the important facts and reinforce what you’ve studied. If you have ‘questions about your questions’, seek clarification from your teacher. Keeping questions about the material may slow you down initially, this practice will save you time and in the long run you won’t have to go back through your textbook. Find a peer in class that will also create questions, exchange, and alternate answering questions.
Underlining
Underlining or highlighting material in textbooks can be helpful, be careful not to just highlight everything! Underlining is effective for three reasons:
First, it helps you focus on what’s important. If you underline everything… you are wasting your time. Select a summary sentence of the paragraph, the main fact statements, and important supporting material. Underline what you want to remember and what you think may be on tests.
Second, underlining helps you maintain active learning. By underlining, you are taking an active role in studying, so you will less likely be passively reading through material and miss important points.
Third, underlining helps you review. If you have points highlighted, you can quickly review what you’ve studied.
Outlining
When you outline, you force yourself to restate only the important material and you are still taking an active role. Often students rely on reviewing notes and outlines prior to a test. A disadvantage of outlining is patience for a student since it is time-consuming. Students do report the actual physical act of writing important material helps with long-term retention.
Pretend To Be A Teacher
Imagine you are teaching a class and have to teach the information you’ve learned in your own words. This is one of the best ways to pinpoint the material you’ve understood and reveal concepts that need more work. Teach the material to anyone that will listen…the dog, your parents, your sister/brother. If you can teach it accurately, fluently, in your own words, you know it!
See Ms. Seraydarian or Mrs. Carroll in the MAC if you have questions! All the strategies in the google doc can be found on this MAC website: Study Smarter, Time Management, Organizational Skills.
Strategy #1 SQ3R
SQ3R is a comprehension strategy that helps students think about the text they are reading while they’re reading. Often categorized as a study strategy, SQ3R helps students ‘get it’ the first time they read a text by teaching students how to read and think like an effective reader. The strategy including the following 5 steps:
Survey- Students review the text to gain initial meaning from the headings, bolded text, and charts.
Question-Students begin to generate questions about their reading from previewing it.
Read-As students read, they need to look for answers to the questions they formulated during their preview of the text. These questions, based on the structure of the text, help focus students’ reading.
Recite-As students move through the text they should recite or rehearse the answers to their questions and make notes about their answer for later studying.
Review-After reading, students should review the text to answer lingering questions and recite the questions they previously answered.
Strategy #2 PQ4R
Another study strategy that helps you digest the information you’re reading. This approach has 6 steps:
Preview- Skim the material. Read the titles, headings, and other highlighted text.
Question-Think through the questions that pertain to the material.
Read- As you work through the material, try to find answers to your questions.
Reflect-Consider whether you have any unanswered questions or new questions.
Recite- Speak aloud about the things you just read.
Review-Look over the material one more time.
Strategy #3 THIEVES
There are 7 pre-reading steps to studying.
Title- Read the title
Headings-Look through the headings.
Introduction-Skim the intro.
Every first sentence in a section-Take a look at how each section begins
Visuals and vocabulary-Look at the pictures and the words in bold print.
End questions-Review the questions at the end of the chapter.
Summary-Read the overview of the text.
While practice is vital to learning and memory, studies have shown that practice is far more effective when it’s broken into separate periods of training that are spaced out. This takes more effort, and most students believe they learn better with massed practice. Cramming for tests is an example of massed practice. Cramming may get you through a test, but it will be long forgotten by the time of the end-of-term exam. Spacing out your practice may feel less productive. What you don’t sense at the moment is that the added effort is making the learning stronger.
Spaced practice, for durable learning,requires time for mental rehearsal and the processes of consolidation, where new learning is strengthened, given meaning, and connected to prior knowledge, for long term memory. This happens over hours and several days.
Spaced practice works better.
In a test given after the sessions, surgical students whose lessons were spaced out a week apart outperformed their colleagues. Other students scored lower on all measures when four study sessions were crammed in a single day. Practice current and prior knowledge.
The idea is that the better your mastery, the less frequent the practice. A deck of flashcards can provide an example of spacing, Sebastian Leitner developed the Leitner Box- a series of four file car boxes. In the first are study materials that must be practiced frequently because you often make mistakes in them, In the second box are the cards you’re pretty good at, and that box gets practiced less often. The cards in the third box are practiced less often than those in the second box, and so on. If you mess up you move the card up a box.
Varied practice helps engage the brain in different ways. Practicing all the same problems, for example 20 problems that are the same, is not realistically how you see it on a test. The problems on a test are unpredictable, and out of sequence.. Many students should be practicing a variety of problems. For learning to have value, the student must be adept at discerning, “What kind of problem is this?” so you can select and apply an appropriate solution. Keep practicing fundamentals from time-to-time, so you stay sharp, and change it up in practice!
Retrieval Practice
Stephen Madigan, professor at USC, was astonished by the performance of a student in a very difficult class. This student, Tim Fellows, consistently earned 90-95 percent on exams, papers, multiple choice questions, short-answer questions and class activities; extraordinary grades for any student in the Psych 101 class. Madigan saw Fellows around campus and at games and knew Fellows had an active social life outside of class as well. In conversation, Fellows gave Madigan a list of study habits he uses to help incoming students:
Always do the reading prior to the lecture.
Anticipates test questions and the answers as he’s reading
Answers rhetorical questions in his head during lectures to test his retention of the reading
Reviews study guides, finds terms he can’t recall or doesn’t know, and relearns those terms
Copies bolded terms and their definitions into a reading notebook, making sure that he understands them
Takes a practice test; and from this he discovers which concepts he doesn’t know and makes a point to learn them
Reorganizes the course information into a study guide of his design
Writes out concepts that are detailed or important, posts them above his bed, and tests himself on them from time to time.
Spaces out his review and practice over the duration of the course
Fellows’s study habits are a good example of doing what works and keeping at it, so that practice is spaced, and the learning is solidly embedded at exam time.
These best practice suggestions can be implemented whether your child is in middle school, high school, or college. .
From: Make It Stick. Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel
It’s the #1 strategy for most students, and what students tell us when they share that they've ‘studied all night’...but is it effective? It makes sense for a student to reread a text once if they haven't read it in a while. But doing multiple readings in close succession is a time-consuming strategy that does not yield positive outcomes on a test. Why? Studies show when a student repeatedly rereads a chapter, they showed no improvement in learning over those who read it once. When rereading something, students read with a sense of “I know this”, basically students don’t process information deeply. It gives the student the illusion that they know the material very well every time they reread it.
Using active learning strategies is most effective for studying. Surprised? Here are some techniques that are worth your child’s time investigating:
Read once, quiz yourself with the questions in back of the chapter or questions you make up yourself. Retrieving this information is actually what produces more robust learning and memory. It also shows a student what they know and what they still need to study.
Connect new information to something you already know. How is it alike? How is it different? How is it connected to a past lesson?
Draw out the information in visual form. Make diagrams, visual models, concept maps, or flowcharts. Be able to write down and describe different aspects of the information. Don’t skip the writing part, it’s effective to see how much information you can put into your own words.
Use flashcards to test and retest yourself.
Space out your studying. Cramming the night before may help immediately with the test, but doesn’t create long-term memory. Review information a little everyday. Practice a little bit one day, then 2 days later. Study after study shows spacing is really important.
Working Memory involves the ability to remember something and to perform an activity while using this memory. Working memory involves both verbal and visual-spatial skills. Verbal working memory helps us to remember instructions and comprehend what we have heard. Visual-Spatial working memory helps us to remember sequences of events and images and is important in math skills. Working memory involves both the amount of information that you can store temporarily in your head and the length of time you keep it there.
Working memory applies to many different learning situations, including academics. We use working memory to help us
Complete reading comprehension and math-related tasks
Plan and organize assignments and projects
Use strategy and rule-following in extracurriculars
Follow complicated multi-step directions
Learn from and understand social situations at home and school including following conversations
Want to Improve Working Memory? Learn strategies to help boost working memory!
Break big chunks of information into bite-size pieces. Learn to chunk items routinely.
Repeat what you’ve heard or read in your head a few times while visualizing a picture.
Use checklists for tasks with multiple steps. Use post-it notes!
Develop routines. Create a routine when you get home from extracurriculars and school. Place your phone, homework, and keys in the same place every time you come home.
Make connections when you study by using graphic organizers.
Experiment with various ways to remember information; songs, mnemonics, visualization; even associating colors with information to jog your memory
Summarize the information you hear.
Read aloud your notes while you are rewriting them. .
Memory fails us when we are overtired, overwhelmed, or really hungry.. Minimize these challenges to working memory. Getting enough sleep, eating a good diet, and exercising regularly won’t necessarily improve memory, but will feed your ‘brain’. There is evidence that physical exercise can improve memory and attention.
Reduce distractions and your stress level. Your memory can’t compete with music, the tv, kitchen conversations, incoming pinging with texts, the phone ringing, and the dogs barking.
Find a place where you do your work as a student (your job) AND NOTHING ELSE. You need a routine workspace. This could be your desk in your room or the kitchen table. It needs to be somewhere where you can be self-disciplined to be focused on work.
a. DOs- In the workspace are all materials a student needs: laptop, charger, lighted area, pens/pencils, paper. The area needs to be away from distractions. Put the phone away before you sit down in the workspace.
The ideal amount of time to focus is 20 minutes. Taking a 5 minute break then resets your focus and attention, allowing your brain to be far more effective. This helps tremendously when you are setting up a homework/study schedule.
b. DON’Ts: Don’t browse the internet for fun to pass the time, don’t watch youtube videos, don’t watch Netflix, don’t play on your phone, don’t text. You want this spot to be YOUR WORK spot! If you have trouble with eliminating distractions while on your computer, try 'forest'. It is an extension on Chrome that will allow you to focus for 25 minutes while also blocking the 'distractions'. (Forest app)
Your eyes are are connected to your cognition. Simply put: if you are looking at it, your brain is thinking about it. So, you must have your eyes ON THE GOOGLE MEET that your class is currently in. If you are looking at a jersey on amazon, or an email from a friend, or another assignment, or a youtube video, your brain is thinking about those things.
Find a study buddy for each class. You can compare notes with this study buddy, not just ‘get’ notes from someone. This is an effective form of studying. You can also confirm due dates and expectations of assignments with the study buddy.
Take ownership of your learning. If you don't understand the content, you need to communicate that information and ask for help. Attending tutorial via your teacher's google meet links is a great way to ask for clarification, more practice on a topic, check in, etc.
Combat the "fear of the unknown" by gathering all of your exam information into one place. It's an Exam Organizer! Click here.
The Best Study Technique for Tests and Exams- Self-Testing! Click on the link below to learn about Student Self-Testing!https://takinglearningseriously.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Self-Testing-Tip-Sheet-STUDENTS.pdf