10 Tips for Studying Better and Efficiently by WowEssays

These are some psychological tricks to help you value your study methods, and here you can read a series of tips to study efficiently to optimize the time and effort you devote to your learning.

If you apply them to your routine during the course, your academic grades will likely significantly increase.

1. Cut Study Time into Small Chunks

It is better to control the time we spend studying by setting a relatively low time limit for each session. Ideally, study times should not exceed 30 minutes since we show much more ease in assimilating information that comes to us in short, repeated bursts than in a single long, tedious one.

2. Create a study routine

Proposing a study schedule and following it not only offers an image of maturity and neatness, as it has notable effects on study performance. Approaching learning in a disorganized manner is a way to end up studying late at night when sleep and tiredness take a toll on our ability to concentrate.

3. Create summary notes on individual sheets

Don’t rely too much on the technique of underlining text. Underlining does not help memorize the text if it is not reviewed several times. In any case, sticking to the memorization of the sentences that have a line underneath keeps us anchored to how the information is distributed in the original text.

4. Keep distractions away

Your blacklist should include Facebook, cell phone, and TV, but you can have other elements of your daily life and do your best to isolate yourself from all of them during your study time.

5. Prepare your study material first

Having everything you need ready will keep you from getting up to get things and distract you. Also, associating this set of objects to the study will make you enter the dynamics of studying with ease every time you see it.

6. Suggest (at least) one unit of study for each session

Set a topic to study and study it. Organizing related information by staying on a topic or category of any kind is much easier than learning scattered and messy pieces of information.

7. Flee from literal memorization

Make the information contained in the texts your own. Relate it to episodes in your life, rephrase it in your own words and use examples you know. That way, you will achieve the meaningful learning you need.

8. Avoid linear memorization

Think, above all, of similarities and differences between concepts, pieces of information that in the texts you have studied do not appear to be very connected, but that could be in specific exam questions, for example.

9. Practice constantly

If you have the possibility, evaluate yourself with tests or questionnaires about the subject you are studying. It may seem like a waste of time if you think that time well spent can only be spent “soaking up” the information to be learned. Still, it is not at all, since it will help you detect failures and measure your progress and therefore keep your motivation high, which will also have a positive impact on your performance.

10. Explain the lesson to someone else

Explaining what you have learned in your own words is possibly the most valuable study advice, as it will bring you two significant benefits. On the one hand, reformulating the lesson is a way of mentally reviewing what you have studied, so the time you spend on this will serve to assimilate better what you have learned before.

On the other hand, it will help you evaluate yourself, detect points that you thought you had learned but that at critical moments give you problems, and it offers you a reasonably faithful image of your progress.