6 Tips for effective study

Learning

     Here are some practical tips you can use when actually learning new content. Remember, everyone learns differently, so not all of these suggestions will apply to you, but it is worth trying them out because I found them very useful!

1. Learn in class. Rather than messing around or looking out of the window and wishing you were elsewhere, use the time and teacher's expertise given to you to actually learn. If you are sat in school, you might as well pay attention and learn what you have to now so that you don't have to teach yourself anything in your own free time later.

2. Use different coloured highlighters for different levels of importance. Colour coding information is a quick and easy way to identify key areas you need to remember and review when you revise from your notes later. Using different colours helps you to organise information according to what types of information it is, what you need to do with it and how important it is to know. For example, you could highlight key concepts in red, subpoints in purple, key words in blue and detailed facts in light blue.

3. Utilise numbered bullet points. Using numbers rather than dots can help you recall information because if you remember that you have three bullet points but you can only remember two, you will put in that extra effort to be able to remember the third, rather than simply assuming that there must have only been two points you wanted to make. Another benefit of using numbers is that you can order lists of information in order of importance, with key information being at the top of lists so you are more likely to remember them, or putting information that you keep on forgetting at the top of a list so that you can review them more often to help you remember them more easily.

4. Organise notes/ remember facts as part of a topic (e.g. syllabus section) but understand links between other topics. Organise your notes so that you have all the information you need for one topic in one place. A lot of exams unfortunately are only testing what you recall from their specification, so organising yourself so that you know exactly what the exam is looking for you to write about can help you remember things and get marks more easily. However, although it is useful to remember information in chunks, you should always know how each piece of information links to other information as that also helps with memory and understanding.

   
   

5. Understand everything as soon as you learn it. By that, I mean that you should strive to understand everything you have been taught at the time that you have been taught it. If you don't understand something, ask your teacher, a mentor or do your own research. Don't leave it until later, when you 'promise' yourself that you will figure it out, because by then you will be busy with something else. If you understand something at the time you learnt it, it will make it much easier for your own revision later on as you will only have to remind yourself of what you learnt rather than teaching them to yourself from scratch.

   
   

6. Do enough practice questions so that you understand, don't do more easy questions than necessary. Practice questions are super useful to help you know how an exam wants you to format an answer. Answering questions not only tests your active recall, but it also helps you to get familiar with exam style questions so that they are less scary in an exam. However, you must be aware of the time-wasting trap of just answering easy questions to make you feel good, as they do not help you do better with your studies. It is important to do just enough questions so that you are fully confident about your abilities in that area and are capable of dealing with all variations of that question, but that you move on to another question or a harder one once you know what you are doing.