Study Skills to Help You Study

Recently I have watched three videos which were all based on different and efficient ways to help you with your studies. The first video was about Three Best Science Study Tips. It talked about how to apply science to studying. The three methods of how-to study are Quizzing, Spacing and Mixing. The reason why those are efficient ways to study is because they are difficult which forces you to challenge yourself. The struggle improves your learning and strengthens the connections in your brain.

More effort => more brain activity => strengthens brain connections => the information sticks better in your brain.

Quizzing – no peaking at answers

Practice like for an exam. Pretend that you’re doing the exam and how would it look like. Just like sports and music, you can’t process the information just by watching the game or listening to the songs or in this case just reading the words on the page. Instead make yourself note, use flashcards and practice questions.

Spacing – when to study

During that video I found out that when you first study something you remember it, but after only 24 hours you already forget most of the information that you have studied. So how do you know when to study? Right when your about to forget, that’s when you should study. You can create a revision timetable to help you.

Mixing – how often to switch

Mixing means that you shouldn’t stay on one topic while studying. Instead mix it between different subjects and understand the connections for better learning. You should study around 50 minutes on one subject and then take a 10-minute break from it and then do a different subject next. If 50 minutes is too long, then start with 15 minutes then 30 minutes and so on.

 

The next video that I have watched was focusing about 5 Active Reading Strategies for Textbook Assignments. The five strategies are pseudo-skimming (skim though each paragraph quickly and find out which one has the most important information), read backwards (go to the back of the chapter and reads the summary of the chapter, the questions, and the review), come up with questions while you read ( when you read something and don’t understand it then mark it as a question), pay attention to the format of the text ( if a word is bold then it might be important), make notes while reading/ mark where you read (better recall as those are your own words). Each one of those techniques is quite useful when you’re trying to learn something but you’re not sure how to do it without forgetting.

Another few things to do is to use the flag method, which is marking the pages that you have read. You can also use a pencil to bracket the parts that that hold the most important information. Another thing to do is to take notes after you have read the chapter.

The third and last video was a ted talk about Creating Critical Thinkers Through Media Literacy by Andrea Quijada. That video taught me what Media Literacy is. It is about discovering the truth behind the information given. It also help discover the target audience for the specific advertisement or newspapers, ect. As Ms. Andrea said it’s the lasso of truth that we have.

Out of all these videos I only have used the techniques from the first video and those worked quite well for me. But from what I heard from the other videos, the other techniques would help improve your studying by a lot.