By The Princeton Review
You may have a study routine or a favorite study spot. Or your study habits may vary depending on your mood. If you aren’t getting the most out of your study sessions, here are some fool-proof study techniques that'll get you on the right path to acing your Physics exam and finishing your paper on the Spanish Civil War. You could be getting better scores without having to invest a second more of your time—you just need to study smarter.
Choose a conducive study space, then alternate. Find a place with minimal disruption where you can stay focused and uninterrupted. The ideal study environment will differ from person to person, but try a quiet coffee shop, or an empty classroom, a spot that fits your study habits. Then come back to the material, and do it in a different spot. Were you in your bedroom earlier? Try the library. Or even sit in the car. Your brain forms subtle connections between the material and your environment. And the more connections your brain makes for a piece of knowledge, the easier it is for you to recall it later. Students who study in different rooms score higher than students who study in the same spot.
Don’t procrastinate. Space out study sessions. The first thing you need remember is not to wait until the night before your exam to start studying. This can be over the course of a month or a week or even a day, but it is important to leave the material and come back to it later. Revisiting the material after a break requires you to re-learn it somewhat, which improves the strength of your learning. Using multiple study sessions also provides you with the opportunity to take advantage of the strategies listed below. So set aside study time, review your notes from class (a little bit each night), and plan early.
Take breaks. A12-hour marathon study session won’t do anything but make you crazy. Instead, take short breaks every hour and leave your study area when you do. Breaks will help you stay focused, healthy, and happy. After long hours of staring at a screen, skimming through your notes, or reading book that you may or may not have had all semester to read, breaks are something to look forward to, a change of pace and a chance to relax and recharge. 15-20 minutes should be sufficient.
Form a study group. If the information you're attempting to absorb is dense, a study group can lessen the load. Friends and other students in the class can help make studying less boring, and make you more willing to actually do it. Make sure your group is made up of equally motivated and intelligent people, slackers need not apply. Become an expert on the specific topic you're assigned, then meet a few days prior to the exam to go over the material. Or you can use this time to brush up on concepts you didn’t quite understand, that other classmates might have down pat. Plus, explaining something you understand to another student is a great way to organize your thoughts and will help you articulate them during the exam. The bonus is the social aspect of a study group, which makes it feel at least a little less tedious than your solo sessions.
Use note cards. The sheer repetition of reading information and jotting it down helps you absorb the information. After all, practice and conditioning is what studying is all about. Plus learning material in smaller “chunks” will be more effective and is more easily recalled.
Stay nourished. Don't forget to eat or snack, healthily, of course. To stimulate those brain cells, eat blueberries. Try dark chocolate or freshly brewed tea. Both contain caffeine, which should boost your energy and level of concentration. Nuts and seeds are easy to pack and take with you too. Don’t forget to hydrate by drinking lots of water (avoid soda which contains sugar and can affect mood and stress level).
Exercise. Studying can make you tense up and become a ball of nerves. Sitting on an uncomfortable wooden chair doesn't help. A quick workout, even as simple as pulling out a yoga mat or doing some squats or jumping jacks, can relieve tension in your muscles, pump up your endorphins, and make you more alert (and burn off all the study snacks).
Test yourself. Have you ever been surprised by the difficulty of a test for which you studied hard? Chances are that your studying didn’t include testing yourself. Testing has a bad reputation because it is so difficult, but its difficulty is what makes it effective. So, how does it work? The act of recalling a piece of information, particularly if it is hard to do so, strengthens your hold on it. And forgetting can be just as helpful if you look up the information right away; the odds are low that you’ll forget it again. Practice tests are far more helpful than repeatedly reading the material or even making outlines or concept maps. Those other strategies can lead you to believe that you know the information better than you actually do. In one study, students who used those techniques retrieved only 2/3 of the information that was retrieved by students who used practice tests to study (even though they had greater confidence that they would do well on the test).
Mix content. This applies to your initial review as well as practice tests. When you focus on the same information for a while, your brain gets lazy. It is better to study distinct but related concepts—such as a series of different math formulas—in each sitting. This forces your brain to figure out the similarities and differences between the pieces of information and figure out when to apply each one. And it doesn’t hurt that real tests generally feature mixed content—you rarely get tests with all questions of a single type lumped together. In your textbooks, end-of-chapter review questions, which mix up the topics, are more effective than end-of-section review questions, which usually contain a more limited number of concepts.
Figure out what will be on the exam: No, this doesn’t require any mind reading abilities, but it does require you to listen and pay close attention to your teacher (or just ask questions about what types of topics the midterm will cover). You may be surprised at how much your teacher is willing to share.
Now hopefully you won’t be driven to the brink of sanity and you can reduce the effects of that added midterm stress.