Wild plum.
5 Bad Study Habits
You’ve Probably Been Following
Tom Miller
You hear a lot of platitudes when it comes to studying:
“Make studying a priority.
Review your notes early and often.” “Read all the
textbook chapters
and do your homework.” “Practice makes perfect. So
practice as much as you can.”
First off, all the students who have ever been in a
classroom just collectively rolled their eyes. Second, most of this stuff we
hear, though well intentioned (maybe), is just plain wrong.
A lot of bad study habits are spread in the guise of
helpful advice.
Here are 5 of the most common bad study habits
that parents, teachers, and advisors teach,
and why they’re actually hurting your GPA:
1. Read the
chapter before lecture
Here’s something we’ve all heard teachers say at the end
of class:
“Read chapter 12 on the Law of Cosines before class
tomorrow so that we can jump right in.”
And you probably wanted to say, “Wait a sec… isn’t that
your job?”
Anyway, no one does it (except maybe that guy who always
sits in the front row). Even if we tell ourselves we’re gonna “get
organized” and prepare before lecture, no one ever does the reading. And if you
do, it’s usually a lackluster skim effort.
But would it actually help if we did?
Should we actually care about “getting organized” and
doing the reading before class?
Research suggests that this is a waste. An initial review
period is necessary to learn something new, but further review becomes less and
less effective.
So why would you review something twice?
Well, because repetition improves your ability to recall
something later. Practice makes perfect.
Not so fast. While it is useful to get a quick “lay of
the land” on a new concept
before going into lecture completely cold, beyond an
initial introductory period to a new concept, your ability to remember, recall,
and use that information does not improve with review.
What you need instead is testing and use. So that
valuable time before lecture is much better spent quizzing yourself on the
information from the previous lecture. Stuff that you’ll eventually see
on the midterm or final, rather than some arcane
explanation from a textbook.
Use the lecture the way it was intended: to
introduce you to new material.
2. Get a study
buddy
As you walk through your campus library, you see them
everywhere: books scattered across tables, empty energy drink cans, and
problems scribbled on pieces of paper or whiteboards.
Study groups.
Some people can’t stand to sit with other students for
hours on end racking their brain
over chemical reactions or Freudian psychology, but
others can’t get enough of it
and seem to find any excuse to meet up and “go over” the
latest lecture notes.
So who’s got it right?
Studying with someone else can help you stay accountable,
but that’s pretty much all it can do.
Yes, knowing someone is waiting for you at 4pm at the
library is motivation enough to get your butt out the door, and crack that
notebook that otherwise would stay on the floor
in the corner of your dorm room. But doing practice
problems with another person is the quickest way to fool yourself into thinking
you can reproduce it yourself on an exam.
It’s one thing to watch someone solve a tough physics
problem and nod along saying “oh yeah,
got it.” But it’s a completely different thing to
actually reproduce that problem-solving method during crunch time, staring at a
blank sheet of paper.
So definitely still make friends in your classes, and
keep each other accountable.
But limit working on problem sets together to those
couple of sticking points
you still have after working through everything yourself.
Then go back a day or two later and make sure you truly understand it well
enough to reproduce it yourself.
3. Review your notes after class
Passive review of your notes is not only time-consuming,
it’s also been shown to be completely ineffective. And yet, this is what most
teachers recommend. It’s what “good students” do.
But as with habit #1, this robotic type of study is
not suited to the way the human memory system stores new
information. Again, it’s far more effective to test yourself instead.
Try to re-create the key concepts or solve a few practice
problems
without referring to your notes from class. Do this
again a day or two later.
Studies have shown that this self-testing method is a
much better use of your time than simply “refreshing” a dead page of text. The
only time you should touch your notes is when you’re going
to try and re-organize and consolidate them into a more
simple and compact form.
4. Find a quiet
space and make it a daily habit
“Turn off the music! How can you concentrate with that
on?”
“Stay still and be quiet. Just sit down and focus.”
Sound familiar?
This motherly advice is typically in response to
multitasking teenagers who text, listen to music,
have Facebook open, and are Skyping with a classmate
while doing their homework.
So yes, in that case they may have a point.
But the other extreme actually may be detrimental to
future performance on exams.
Routinely studying in exactly the same quiet place is the
best way to ensure that you can only recall that information reliably in that
one spot. In essence, you’re training yourself to completely
blank on that information when test day comes, when
you’re thrown into an anxious mental state, under time pressure and sitting in
a foreign environment (unless you happen to have one of those chairs in your
apartment with the desk so small you can barely fit a piece of paper on it).
What you should actually do: study in widely varying
contexts.
Studies have show that learning new information in
different environments,
at varying noise levels and even mood states,
can significantly improve your ability to recall that
same information when test day comes.
So mix it up. Quiz yourself on the treadmill. Lecture
your roommate while playing Call of Duty.
Do practice problems standing on one foot, using a
fountain pen, while listening to ACDC.
And even better: go to the classroom where the exam will
be held, pick out your seat,
and do a practice exam in the same exact amount of time
allotted for the test.
Now that’s context-specific learning.
5. Refresh topics
in your memory often
“If I can just keep reciting my study sheet for the next
24 hours,
I’ll have it on the tip of my tongue during the exam.”
The problem with always feeling like you’re on top a new
concept is that you’re committing what psychologists call the “fluency
illusion.” Just because it’s easy to recall piece of information now, does
not mean you won’t forget it later.
And in fact, the easier it is to recall,
the less likely it is that you will be able to remember
it in crunch time.
Studies show that some level of forgetting is
actually necessary in order to improve the “retrieval strength” of a new
memory. Bjork’s study recommends looking for a level of “desirable
difficulty” with learning new information—e.g. it should be hard to remember
how to solve limits
using L’Hopital’s Rule if you really want to make sure
you can remember it on test day.
So do this: Learn it once during lecture.
Then give yourself a self-test later that night, without
referencing your notes.
Then wait two days. You’ll feel like you’ve forgotten
everything.
But resist the urge to study your notes again.
Instead, test yourself again and struggle through, trying
to pull as much of the material as you can from the depths of your memory. Each
piece of information you can recall becomes more and more bulletproof to
forgetting on the exam. And even wrong answers have been shown to benefit you.
Then, and only then, go back to your notes and see where
you were right and where you were wrong. Make the appropriate corrections and
then repeat the process.
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/5-bad-study-habits-youve-probably-been-following.html
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