Essential Tips to Improve Your Study Skills
Irrespective of which course you are taking in college, your success will depend on your study skills.
Practical study skills epitomize consistency and help students engage closely with what they are studying.
Unfortunately, good study skills do not just happen: you have to build the culture within yourself.
How do you do this? Here are essential tips to help you study effectively.
Create a Study Schedule
Everything requires a solid plan. Studying is no exception. When can you study?
To create a workable timetable, you need to begin by allocating your class times and extra curriculum activities, if any. With this, you can then see how much time is left and schedule your study time.
Once you have this, keep at it. This will take some discipline in the beginning, but you will soon get the hang of it.
Work Smart, Not Hard
It’s often easy to find yourself doing nothing but schoolwork. While this level of dedication is desirable, it can also be counterproductive.
It’s impossible to have a full day of lectures then attempt to study all night. While you can pull this off every so often, it will lead to burnout soon enough if this becomes commonplace.
Instead, space out your study sessions to the most optimal times. A few hours with optimal concentration are more effective than studying all night, struggling to keep your eyes open.
Don’t Fall Behind
Falling behind in one or more classes can make you feel overwhelmed and stressed out. This frame of mind does nothing to help you study as you should.
This makes it important to move at the instructor’s pace. To do this, you will need to attend all classes, finish all homework and assignments and take action when you notice yourself struggling.
If you are having problems with your statistics classes, hire statistic tutors to help you catch up.
Work on Your Note-taking Skills
Note-taking is essential because it helps you study more actively. This is a better way to learn than listening, hoping to recall, or reading pages and pages of text.
However, taking good notes is a skill that requires some effort.
If you take notes during a lecture, strive to remain engaged and listen actively to sift out important information. You can also record lectures and take notes later.
When reading from a textbook, read through the text, then write down what you have learned. You can fill in important details later. This will help you internalize information.
Internalize, Don’t Memorize
Cramming information requires you to depend on your memory to remember learned concepts fully. With all the things you will learn over, and above other information you come across, this isn’t easy to do, especially in the long term.
Instead, aim at understanding what you are learning. Ask or find examples of each concept, find real-life applications, attempt solving problems in each topic, and so on.
This way, you engage more closely with learned content. This helps you to understand it as opposed to memorizing it.
Understand Your Learning style
Formal education leaves little space to accommodate individual student’s learning styles.
However, by knowing what your learning style is, you can optimize your study time. You might learn better from listening to audiobooks than reading through text and so on.
The four main learning styles are:
- Auditory: learners learn best by listening
- Visual: learning is maximized when the student can look at visual
- Reading and writing: these students can read through a book and absorb most concepts in this way and by writing as well
- Kinesthetic: students absorb the most by doing and moving
Once you identify what this is, you will be in a position to maximize study time.
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