5 Effective Study Skills for College Students to Score More
Students need to memorize a lot of studying material to score high in exams. But a simple one- or two-time reading of a material isn’t the most effective way to memorize the syllabus. It is because our minds tend to discard any information it thinks might not be important. That’s why many students find themselves having forgotten the earliest of concepts they previously memorized.
Luckily, there are some study skills students can learn to use and master to memorize their syllabus more effectively and score higher in exams. This article lists 5 of these study skills below.
1. Active Recalling
Active recalling is one of the most effective study skills that every student should learn. It involves actively trying to recall or “retrieve” the learning material from the mind without explicitly looking at it.
It is the opposite of passive recalling, in which students don’t recall a material from memory. Instead, they look at the learning material and read through it once again to memorize it.
Active voice is a more powerful memorization method because it strengthens the brain’s memory patchways, since your mind has to work harder to retrieve the information without looking at it.
There are several methods for active recalling, including: using flashcards, quizzing yourself, and writing down everything you know about a topic from memory without looking at the material.
2. Spaced Repetition
Spaced repetition is a technique that involves revising your learning material over spaced-out time periods. Meaning, with longer time “gaps.” More specifically, it involves reviewing material over longer and longer intervals of time, as you continue. For example, after discovering a concept for the first time, you will revise it after 25 minutes, then after one hour, then after six hours, then twelve hours, followed by twenty four hours, until the material becomes ingrained in your memory.
The reason why it works is because it makes our minds recall the material when it is about to forget it, and with repetition, it weakens the forgetting curve through these repetitive interruptions. Also, spaced repetition is done using the active recalling techniques, mentioned above, which reinforces the memorization of the material.
The specific time intervals that need to be followed depend on the topic’s difficulty and how well you can remember it. If it is easy and easy to remember, use longer intervals, otherwise shorter.
3. The Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro is a well-known time-management technique for studying. The Pomodoro Technique says that you should divide your study sessions into time intervals of 25 minutes (called “pomodoros”) with a 5-minute break after each pomodoro and a longer 2-30–minutes break after the fourth interval.
For example, here’s a two-pomodoro session:
Choosing the task.
Setting a time interval of 25 minutes for each session.
Working for one pomodoro duration continuously without distractions.
Taking a break for 5 minutes.
Working for the second pomodoro duration.
Taking a break for 5 minutes.
Working for the third pomodoro duration.
Taking a break for 5 minutes.
Working for the fourth pomodoro duration.
Taking a longer break of 30 minutes.
This technique helps avoid burnouts due to prolonged study sessions and also helps focus and minimize distractions.
4. Note-Taking With Mind-Mapping
Note-taking is a great way to simplify the information you learn. Transcribing information and structuring it in a notebook can aid your review and understanding of the topic, leading to better memorization.
In case the information is too complex and you’re unable to understand it, you can use Paraphraser.us to simplify and make tough concepts more accessible and digestible!
In addition to this, mind-mapping is a powerful note-taking technique for digesting new concepts using visuals and connecting dots. It involves making a simple drawing of a concept in the middle of a page, treated as the central idea, and drawing branches from it connected to sub-topics’ and related ideas’. This enforces our minds to establish or strengthen the understanding of relationships between related ideas.
Mind-mapping uses pictures, drawings, keywords, and colors to help make the information visual, which further strengthens the memorization of the concept because our visual memories are far more powerful than verbal.
5. The Feynman Technique
The Feynman is another very useful study skill for students. It involves teaching someone else the concept you want to learn better.
The Feynman Technique has four steps, in which you:
Choose a topic and study it so that it is simple enough for you to teach to someone else.
Teach and explain it to someone in the simplest possible way you can.
Reflect back on your explanation and identify gaps in it.
Review the study material and make your explanation more simpler.
If you don’t have anybody to teach the topic to, you can make any non-living object, like a stuffed toy, your student and teach it.
The Feynman technique reinforces the concept to your mind that you’re trying to explain to others. It helps identify the weaknesses in your own understanding of the topic. For example, if you’re teaching about photosynthesis, you might not be able to give a satisfactory answer to the question “How does sunlight become glucose?” Which is a gap in your understanding that you can now fill.
These five techniques will aid you in learning, comprehension, time-management, avoiding burn-out, and memorization of the topic no matter how difficult it might be. If you apply and use these skills to your advantage, you can secure better marks in college.
Conclusion
Studying by reading the material a few times isn’t very effective. It leads to forgetting the material after a while, which can make it difficult to score high marks in exams.
But there are study skills that students can learn and implement to study more effectively and score higher marks, including: active recalling, spaced repetition, the Pomodoro Technique, note-taking with mind-mapping, and using the Feynman Technique. All of these are explained in the article.
