Study skills Study skills or study strategies are approaches applied to learning. They are generally critical to success in school,[1] considered essential for acquiring good grades, and useful for learning throughout one's life. There are an array of study skills, which may tackle the process of organizing and taking in new information, retaining information, or dealing with assessments. They include mnemonics, which aid the retention of lists of information, effective reading, and concentration techniques,[2] as well as efficient notetaking.[3][dead link] While often left up to the student and their support network, study skills are increasingly taught in High School and at the University level. More broadly, any skill which boosts a person's ability to study and pass exams can be termed a study skill, and this could include time management and motivational techniques. Study skills are discrete techniques that can be learned, usually in a short time, and applied to all or most fields of study.
Journal to the Self: 13 Tools to Make Journaling Work for You In this post, I present 13 specific journaling tools you can start using immediately, along with a mind map of the book ‘Journal to the Self: Twenty-Two Paths to Personal Growth‘. Journaling is perhaps the most effective and direct way to get a deeper understanding of yourself and the world around you. By putting your thoughts in writing, you trigger some unique mental processes that often lead to invaluable new insights. In the book Journal to the Self, Kathleen Adams presents many tools that make the process of journaling much easier and enjoyable, presenting plenty of choices to make journaling work for you. Regardless of your writing style (or even if you see yourself as someone who doesn’t enjoy writing at all), you’ll find tips to make your self-discovery journey more effective and enjoyable. Journaling Tools The Journaling Toolbox is the meat of Journal to the Self. Springboards: These are ready-made phrases that answer the question "What should I write about?". Now to the Full Book
Study Smarter, Not Harder Good students don't just study harder, they study smarter. A study published this week identifies some habits of successful college students. I'll describe the new study shortly, but first: How should students study ? A growing body of cognitive psychology research emphasizes the value of two principles: Principle one is space your studying out over time . Principle two is test yourself . Ironically, students often rate spacing and testing as counterproductive. According to the study that came out this week , the good ones do. In summary, low performers were especially likely to base their study decisions on impending deadlines rather than planning, and they were also more likely to engage in late-night studying. Why spacing wasn't significantly related to GPA isn't clear. It's always important to remember that correlation doesn't equal causation. College isn't all about grades, it's really about learning.
Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab - Research Applying Cognitive Psychology to Enhance Educational Practice The primary goal of this research, which is funded by the James S. McDonnell foundation, is to promote learning and memory performance within educational contexts through the investigation of principles in cognitive psychology. Studies address issues of transfer-appropriate and material-appropriate processing between encoding and retrieval. The overlying theme of "desirable difficulties," first introduced by Robert Bjork (1994), is also explored through manipulations in the spacing of learning events and the study schedule produced by interleaving various to-be-learned items, such as English-Swahili translated word pairs or prose materials. Studies have also looked at the effectiveness of similar choices used in multiple choice tests for future test performance as well as the act of generating items when they are presented with missing letters. I. In recent years, we have explored this phenomenon in a variety of ways. II. R.
120 Ways to Boost Your Brain Power Here are 120 things you can do starting today to help you think faster, improve memory, comprehend information better and unleash your brain’s full potential. Solve puzzles and brainteasers.Cultivate ambidexterity. Use your non-dominant hand to brush your teeth, comb your hair or use the mouse. Write with both hands simultaneously. Switch hands for knife and fork.Embrace ambiguity. Learn to enjoy things like paradoxes and optical illusions.Learn mind mapping.Block one or more senses. Readers’ Contributions Dance! Contribute your own tip! There are many, many ways to keep our brains sharp.
We're Only Human...: The Science of Cramming I went to a very nerdy college. This school was so nerdy that the “mascot” was an engineer, and at football games students would chant: “Tangent, secant, cosine, sine. Three point one four one five nine. Go Engineers!” I'm not kidding. So how is it possible that today I do not even know what a secant is? Was I studying the wrong way during all those wee hours? Consider “overlearning.” University of South Florida psychologist Doug Rohrer decided to explore this question scientifically. The results were interesting. Rohrer and Pashler also wanted to see if the scheduling of study breaks might make a difference in learning. All these experiments involved rote learning, but Rohrer and Pashler have also found similar effects with more abstract learning, like math. All we were taught about study skills at my nerdy school was to keep a clean, well-lit work space and eat a good breakfast, and most of us ignored that advice.
Simple Ways To Study Better Knowledge is the essence of smart thinking. No matter how much raw intelligence you have, you are not going to succeed at solving complex problems without knowing a lot. That's why we spend the first 20 (or more) years of our lives in school. Robert Bjork and fellow PT blogger Nate Kornell have explored some of the study habits of college students in a 2007 paper in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review . Of course, guidelines from memory research come from studies in idealized circumstances. To address this question, Marissa Hartwig and John Dunlosky related the study habits of college students to their grade point average (GPA) in a 2012 paper in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review . The students with the highest GPA were more likely to study by testing themselves than the students with lower GPAs. All college students tend to focus their study on upcoming assignments. Finally, the time of day that students study also matters.
Solve Your Problems Simply by Saying Them Out Loud How many times have you gone through explaining a problem to a friend, and before he could say a word about it you had already figured out the solution by yourself? The very act of explaining a problem out loud can, by itself, be enough to solve it. How can this deceptively simple strategy work so well? How can we leverage it, transforming it in a problem-solving technique we can use at anytime? The Magic Behind Explaining Problems Out Loud Communicating your problems out loud has several advantages over silently thinking about them: 1. In order to put your problem in a communicable form you must clarify it, stating it in objective terms. Putting your problem in words will tremendously help you grasp it: language is not only a tool of communication as many believe, but also a tool of thought (for more on that, check ‘Top 3 Reasons to Improve Your Vocabulary‘). 2. Explaining your problem to someone else is particularly effective when you assume no knowledge on the other person’s part. 3.
Think You Know How To Study? Think Again Método de Estudo Muitos dos problemas de aprendizagem existentes entre os estudantes são hoje explicados pela ausência ou uso inadequado de métodos de estudo e pela inexistência de hábitos de trabalho que favoreçam a aprendizagem. Além disso, muitos jovens manifestam atitudes negativas face ao estudo, uma enorme desmotivação para as actividades escolares, dedicando-lhes muito pouco tempo. Por isso pensámos desenvolver, na nossa escola, um conjunto de iniciativas, dirigidas a alunos, professores e encarregados de educação, no sentido de ajudar os jovens a desenvolver um conjunto de competências fundamentais para uma melhor aprendizagem. Uma dessas iniciativas foi a criação, no ano lectivo de 2001/2002, da Sala de Estudo "Aprendizagem com Autonomia" , que tem como objectivo principal ajudar os alunos que a frequentam a adquirir hábitos e métodos de estudo adequados. O segredo do sucesso está na motivação. Sem motivação aprende-se pouco e esquece-se depressa. Os reforços do interesse Pensar no futuro Sublinhar
What Happened to Downtime? The Extinction of Deep Thinking & Sacred Space Interruption-free space is sacred. Yet, in the digital era we live in, we are losing hold of the few sacred spaces that remain untouched by email, the internet, people, and other forms of distraction. Our cars now have mobile phone integration and a thousand satellite radio stations. When walking from one place to another, we have our devices streaming data from dozens of sources. There has been much discussion about the value of the “creative pause” – a state described as “the shift from being fully engaged in a creative activity to being passively engaged, or the shift to being disengaged altogether.” However, despite the incredible power and potential of sacred spaces, they are quickly becoming extinct. Why do we crave distraction over downtime? Why do we give up our sacred space so easily? But this desperate need for constant connection and stimulation is not a modern problem. We are depriving ourselves of every opportunity for disconnection. So what’s the solution? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.