Studying Techniques
In this article, we will be discussing the do’s and do not’s when you are studying for an exam. Everyone finds different studying habits which work for them. Before beginning to work it is important that you make sure you have caught up with all the work and have all the notes. On the other hand, there are certain things that you may think are beneficial at the time but in the long run are not really helpful.
For example, only studying near the exam date. I understand that you may not want to think about exams very much as they worry you too much but it is actually better to start studying as soon as the school year begins. This way you will not be stressing about the workload near the exam. Another thing that everyone is guilty of is saying they are going to study and then putting it off to do something else saying they will “just do it later”. NEVER DO THIS! It may feel great when you are doing it but this is not helpful to you at all as you are doing something called procrastination. You should be studying for important exam or test but instead you are watching YouTube videos or on social media, and yes, I am also guilty of this but I have realised from experience that I should try and stop. A way that you can make studying a bit easier is organising your time. Plan your time for studying as it is very useful to make a study plan to organise not only how long you want to spend on each section but also the breaks you should take. Breaks are almost as important as the studying itself as if you don’t you could easily burn out and struggle to focus properly. Whereas, shorter more productive study sessions have been proven to be more effective.
When studying for an exam, or just in general, you should never have anything around you that will cause a distraction, such as listening to your favourite Spotify playlist, as this will make you concentrate more on what you want to be doing rather than what you actually should be doing. However, a lot of people hate working in complete silence so instead of risking getting distracted by music you want to sing along to its better to listen to music either without lyrics or with lyrics in a foreign language as it will help you focus on the work you have to do.
Highlighting can be a really useful tool but there is a significant difference between helpful highlighting and highlighting just for the sake of it. Most students will tend to over highlight their work which is not useful at all because even though they make a visual impact, it will not make it more likely for the human mind to absorb it. Highlighting in a useful way should mean that you can quickly identify the key things you need to remember by looking at your highlighted notes and is best to keep to it to a minimum. Many workbooks and handouts will have lots of extra information which isn’t always necessary and by highlighting the key parts it becomes far easier to see how much you really need to know and make the studying seem more bearable.
There are a variety of ways which you can layout your notes. Some people like to use flash cards as a way of both writing out the information and them later testing themselves, other prefer to make mind maps and show the links between different pieces of information to help them understand. The best way to figure out which works for you is through trial and error.