Good study habits are usually beneficial. But with the COVID-19 epidemic, it’s even more crucial now. According to Sana, a lot of kids are concerned about sick relatives or acquaintances. Others experience more widespread stress. Additionally, kids across the world are exposed to various teaching methods. Some institutions are resuming in-person instruction with masking and spacing requirements. Other schools feature staggered courses and part-time pupils. Others take all of their lessons online, at least initially.
Your lessons could be disrupted by these circumstances. Additionally, without a teacher or parent watching them, pupils might have to do more. They’ll need to organize their schedule and do more independent study. However, many pupils never acquired those abilities. According to Sana, it may be comparable to instructing pupils to learn to swim by “simply swimming” to them.
Good news: Science may be useful.
Psychologists have studied the most effective study habits for more than a century. For practically every subject, some advice is helpful. Do not, for instance, simply cram! And instead of merely reading the information again, put it to the test. For various kinds of classes, other strategies are more effective. This covers techniques like utilizing graphs or varying the subjects you research. Here are 10 suggestions for improving your study habits.
1. Space out your studying
When he was a student, Nate Kornell “certainly did cram” before important exams. At Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, he studies psychology. He still believes that studying the day before a significant test is a smart idea. But according to research, it’s not a good idea to do all of your studying in one day. Space out those study periods instead.
College students learned vocabulary terms using flash cards in one 2009 study. Some pupils studied each word over the course of four days in separate sessions. Others learned the words in smaller groups during compressed, or massed, sessions that lasted just one day. Overall time spent by both groups was the same. However, tests revealed that the first group was better at learning the terms.
Kornell makes the analogy between our memory to water in a bucket with a tiny leak. When the bucket is still full but there isn’t much more water you can add, try to refill it. If you don’t give yourself enough time between study sessions, part of the information may go from memory. But when you next study, you’ll be able to review it and pick up new information. Next time, you’ll recall it more clearly, he says.
2. Practice, practice, practice!
Instrument practice is common among musicians. Sportsmanship is practiced by athletes. The same should be true of education.
Practice is the finest thing you can do, according to Katherine Rawson, if you want to be able to recall knowledge. She works as a psychologist at Ohio’s Kent State University. Students completed practice exams over a period of weeks in one 2013 study. On the final exam, they performed on average more than a full letter grade better than pupils who had prepared regularly.
College students participated in a research a few years ago where they read content and then completed recall exams. Some only took one exam. Others had a series of tests with brief intermissions of several minutes. A week later, the second group remembered the information better.
3. Don’t just reread books and notes
Cynthia Nebel read her textbooks, workbooks, and notes to learn in her teenage years. According to this psychologist from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, “again and over and over again.” “We know it’s one of the most prevalent terrible study skills that pupils have,” she continues.
Some college students read a material twice in a 2009 research. Some people only read a text once. After the reading, a test was given to both groups. Aimee Callender and Mark McDaniel discovered that these groups’ test scores did not significantly differ. She’s now attending Wheaton College in Illinois. He is employed at St. Louis, Missouri’s Washington University.
According to McDaniel, who also co-wrote the 2014 book Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, students frequently review content that is shallow. Rereading, in his opinion, is like to glancing at the solution to a puzzle rather than solving it yourself. It appears to make sense. You can’t truly tell if you comprehend anything unless you give it a try.
Henry Roediger is one of McDaniel’s Make it Stick coauthors. He is employed at Washington University as well. In a 2010 research, Roediger and two other coworkers compared the exam outcomes of students who had read the same material twice to those of two other groups. One group composed inquiries regarding the information. One group asked questions, while the other group responded. The top performers were those who provided answers. The weakest performers were those who just reread the text.
4. Test yourself
This 2010 study supports Nebel’s preferred method of studying. Her mother tested her on the subject before significant exams. She says, “Now I know that was retrieval practice. It’s among the most effective methods to learn. Nebel began to question herself as she grew older. She may, for instance, conceal the definitions in her notepad. She then made an effort to remember what each phrase meant.
In a research published in Learning & Instruction in August 2020, Rawson and colleagues demonstrated that such retrieval exercise can benefit almost everyone.
College students with the attention disorder known as ADHD were included in this study. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is what it stands for. Overall, retrieval was beneficial to both individuals with and without ADHD.
Make a deck of flash cards whenever you learn something new, advises Sana. Put the responses on the other side after the questions. She claims that friends may even quiz one another over the phone.
Nebel continues, “Try to test yourself the way the teacher does.”
But she advises you to thoroughly question your friends and yourself. And here is why. She was a member of a group that required pupils to create one quiz question for each session of class. The next step was for students to respond to a classmate’s question. According to preliminary statistics, pupils performed worse on tests than they did when the teacher provided the daily quiz questions. The data are still being examined by Nebel’s team. She thinks the pupils’ inquiries might have been overly straightforward.
She observes that teachers frequently go further. They do not only request definitions. Teachers frequently urge their pupils to contrast and compare topics. That requires some analytical thought.
5. Mistakes are okay — as long as you learn from them
You must evaluate your memories. However, it actually doesn’t matter how long you spend on each attempt. A 2016 investigation by Kornell and colleagues yielded that result. The following step, though, is crucial, says Kornell: Verify that you were correct. Then, concentrate on what went wrong.
You’re sort of wasting your time if you don’t figure out the solution, he claims. On the other hand, verifying the answers might help you make better use of your study time. Then you may concentrate on the areas in which you most need assistance.
In fact, Stuart Firestein contends that making errors may be beneficial. He really wrote the book on it; he is a scientist at Columbia University in New York City. It is titled Why Science is So Successful Despite Failure. He contends that learning actually relies heavily on making mistakes.
6. Mix it up
It frequently helps to vary your self-testing. Don’t limit your attention to one subject. Train your brain on various ideas. Interleaving is what psychologists refer to as.
Actually, the questions on your exams will frequently be messed up as well. Interleaving can, more crucially, improve your learning. When you repeatedly practice a single idea, “your attention wanes because you know what’s coming up next,” according to Sana. Change change your routine, and you are now separating the ideas. You may also notice how ideas differ from one another, develop trends, or work well together in various ways.
Consider that you are studying the volume of various forms in arithmetic. Numerous issues might be solved using a wedge’s volume. You may then respond to other batches of queries, each of which dealt with a different form. Alternately, you may calculate the volume of a cone and then a wedge. The volume of a half-cone or a spheroid may be found next. You may then combine them once again. You may even incorporate some division or addition practice.
College students were divided into groups to test each strategy under the guidance of Rawson and others.
The researchers presented their findings in Memory & Cognition last year. Those who interleaved their practice questions performed better than the group who practiced in a single batch.
Interleaving can benefit kids with both strong and weak working memory, as Sana and others shown a year earlier. When following a recipe, for example, working memory helps you recall where you are in the process.
7. Use pictures
Nebel advises paying attention to the graphs and diagrams in your course materials. “Those images can help you remember this information much better. Additionally, if none exist, making them can be quite helpful.
According to McDaniel, “I believe that these visual representations assist you in developing more thorough mental models.” Students were had to sit through a lecture on vehicle brakes and pumps by him and Dung Bui, who was at Washington University at the time. One group was given schematics and instructed to annotate them as necessary. Another group was given a note-writing plan. The third team only made notes. If students were otherwise adept at creating mental models of what they were reading, the outlines were helpful. However, they discovered that in these exams, visual aids were helpful to all pupils.
Even silly images might be beneficial. German psychologist Nikol Rummel works at Ruhr University Bochum. In a 2003 study, she and other researchers sent information on five scientists who examined intelligence along with cartoon pictures to college students. For instance, a graphic of a race car driver accompanied the text about Alfred Binet. In order to shield his brain, the driver donned a bonnet. On a test, students who viewed the illustrations performed better than those who merely read the text.
8. Find examples
Understanding abstract ideas can be challenging. According to Nebel, having a tangible example of anything makes it much simpler to create a mental image.
For instance, foods that taste sour often do so because they are acidic. That idea could be difficult to recall on its own. However, it is simpler to grasp and remember that acids and sour go together if you think of a lemon or vinegar. Additionally, the examples could make it easier for you to recognize the acidic flavor of different foods.
In fact, it is helpful to have at least two instances when trying to apply knowledge to fresh circumstances. In July 2019, Nebel and others examined research on this. They outline how students might enhance their study abilities in their Journal of Food Science Education article.
9. Dig deeper
If you don’t go farther, it’s difficult to recall a list of numbers and information. Ask why something is the way it is. What caused them to exist? Why are they important? Elaboration is what psychologists refer to as. Nebel describes it as using the content from the lesson and “asking a lot of how and why questions about it.” To put it another way, don’t take information at face value.
You can better understand new knowledge when you can connect it to what you already know. Additionally, she claims that it expands the network of related concepts in your brain. Learning and memory are made simpler by the bigger network.
According to McDaniel, imagine that you are expected to recall a series of details about various males. For instance, “The hungry man entered the vehicle. The powerful guy assisted the woman. The courageous man dashed inside. so on. College students struggled to recall the plain assertions in one of his studies from the 1980s. They performed better when researchers explained each man’s behavior to them. And when they had to give reasons for each man’s actions, the pupils’ memories were far better.
According to McDaniel, “excellent knowledge promotes extremely good recall.” And for a lot of students, that’s essential. Ask additional questions if information seems to be coming at you randomly. Ensure that you can explain the subject. Even better, he advises, try to explain it to someone else. Some of his college students accomplish this by calling home to inform their parents about what they are studying.
10. Make a plan — and stick to it
Many students are aware that they should space out their study sessions, test themselves, and develop other beneficial abilities. Even still, many people don’t truly follow through. They frequently don’t make advance plans.
Rawson utilized a paper calendar for her planning while she was a student. The dates for each exam were entered by her. She remembers, “And then for four or five additional days, I wrote in time to study.”
Attempt to maintain a routine as well. Establish a regular time and location for studying and doing your homework. It may initially appear strange. However, by the time week two comes around, it becomes a common occurrence, Kornell tells you. Nebel continues, “And while you’re working, put your phone somewhere else.”
Give yourself brief rest periods. Sana advises setting a timer for about 25 minutes. Without any interruptions, study during that period. Take a five or ten minute pause once the timer sounds. Exercise. Look at your phone. Possibly sip some water; whatever. Then start the timer once more.
McDaniel continues, “If you have a study strategy, stick to it! He and psychologist Gilles Einstein from Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, have examined the reasons why students don’t employ effective study techniques. Many kids claim knowing what such talents are. However, they frequently fail to make plans for when they want to implement them. Even when students do make arrangements, a more alluring opportunity can present itself. They advise making studying a priority. On July 23, the team released its report in Perspectives on Psychological Science.