How to make the most of your learning experience.
The average high school student has at least one assessment per week. Studying smart becomes a necessity, but many students are not sure of the best way to go about studying. The following are some tried and true study strategies you can use to improve your learning experience.
Gather all of the material you need to know. Take information from class notes, textbooks, homework assignments and quizzes and write it all down in a document. Organize it into categories.
Ask your teacher what the format of the test will be. If it is “fill in the blank,” then, anticipate questions using that format. If there will be short answer questions or an essay, you’ll want to create some hypothetical questions based on your content which allows you to practice answering these types of questions.
Even when you don’t have to learn a bunch of material and use it directly on an assessment, knowing the terms, the approaches and/or the information specifically speaking can be very helpful.
For instance, when I was studying for an Algebra I test with a student, I helped her to memorize approaches to all of the problems she’d encountered by writing the directions and the problems onto note cards. Then, we flipped through the cards and she told me her approach to each problem. In this way she studied her “game plan” for solving each problem.
Break up your studying over time. Do not learn everything in one day. It is best to know everything (at least 90%) before the day of your test. You should use backwards planning to learn a little bit of material each day.
Do not study by simply reading through your notes. Be active with the material you are learning. You can do this in a myriad of ways depending on your learning style:
- Increase your left margin so that you can write questions to go along with your notes. Then quiz yourself!
- Make a video on the Educreations app explaining a concept and play it back.
- Make a video on Video Star about content you are learning and play it back to yourself. Sometimes making gestures or acting out words you need to learn helps to learn them.
- Use acronyms to learn lists of material. (PEMDAS is an acronym for the order of operations: Parenthesis, Exponents, Multiplication/Division, Addition/Subtraction)
Originally published at medium.com