If your study strategy involves a highlight marker and a lot of repetition, then you’re keeping it old school. Putting sticky notes on everything doesn’t always work and thanks to advances in education research, students have access to better options.
The latest studies suggest that the following five studying techniques yield better results.
- Testing Yourself
John Dunlosky and his team from Kent University stated that testing yourself after you study or before writing an exam is an important study strategy. Creating your own test questions after completing every chapter or unit is a highly beneficial technique.
By asking yourself questions, you teach yourself how to source the most important information from your study materials. If testing yourself seems far too tedious a process, consider getting help from a tutoring service like VCE tutoring.
A tutor can assist you in answering questions that seem overly complex. They’ll test you after every unit to see how much you have grasped, and when you push yourself, you step into the shoes of a teacher and structure your learning in a more productive way.
Test questions allow you to comprehend what you read and recall important information. It also prepares you for what you need to know for each test.
- The Study Timetable
The purpose of a timetable is to help you pace out your studies, and it’s based on one of the most effective studying techniques, which is to absorb information over a long period of time.
For those who love to cram, the sad news is that learning over a longer duration is more effective by far. You tend to get more value out of your studies if you take in bite-sized chunks of information in small units of time that are spread out over many weeks and months.
- The Previewing Technique
The end goal of studying for most people is to be effective and get good grades. However, looking forward to the finish line is the wrong attitude to have. You still need to look ahead, you just need to do it in a slightly different way.
Employ the previewing technique whereby you skim through and summarize materials before you dive headfirst into your studies. Knowing where a subject is going to take you is very helpful because you won’t be seeing the information for the first time.
- Mind Maps
Mind maps are graphic representations of your thoughts. The benefit of studying by using a mind map is that it allows you to visually remember how all the different aspects of a subject interact.
Draw a mind map with one main title. Add branches of thought that explain the main title and all the primary information associated with it.
- Swap Highlighting For Outlining
Instead of highlighting text, this study technique requires you to outline the main topics covered in each section of your study material. In point form, write down only the key takeaways for each chapter or unit.
Outlining key points in your study material is a time-consuming process, so you want to only engage in this if you have ample time to do it.
In case you’re wondering why highlighting important points doesn’t work as well as outlining, it’s because most people highlight almost everything without paying attention to the true essentials. This is what makes the highlighting technique futile and useless for most people.
Try these scientifically proven study methods and see if they work for you. Chances are, you’ll see massive improvements in your ability to retain information and apply your knowledge effectively during exams.