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Studying Habits
McAllen
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
A topic about advice and tips on how to focus yourself when you study.
I took my last summer college course(ended yesterday), and I swear I was at the breaking point of reading and studying. I don't have any diagnosed mental disorders, but I felt that I could hardly push myself to finish the last thirty pages of a book or chapter. I try and motivate myself that it would be stupid to pay money and not put much effort into the homework, but even if I give myself a break I find it hard to get back on track.
What has been the most successful ways of studying for you? Do you read and copy the chapter word-for-word, do you muscle through it, or do you read and that's that?
I took my last summer college course(ended yesterday), and I swear I was at the breaking point of reading and studying. I don't have any diagnosed mental disorders, but I felt that I could hardly push myself to finish the last thirty pages of a book or chapter. I try and motivate myself that it would be stupid to pay money and not put much effort into the homework, but even if I give myself a break I find it hard to get back on track.
What has been the most successful ways of studying for you? Do you read and copy the chapter word-for-word, do you muscle through it, or do you read and that's that?
McAllen on
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This would probably work for memorization type stuff, but it probably won't do much good for literature and philosophy type stuff.
If you're studying for a literature or philosophy class you want to engage with the work more than just highlighting or underlining, which are passive activities. Instead, I would recommend writing margin notes or buying a pack of post-its so you can write comments, questions, and all that good stuff. If a passage seems out of place, make a note of it. If you're seeing similar situations arise, make a note of it. If Nietzsche keeps talking about how women shouldn't be allowed to read, make a note of it.
As far as study habits go, as others have said, it's pretty much on a class-by-class basis. My Econ courses involve a lot of online practice questions and graph manipulation, in my Law courses I find it helpful to organize a study group, and in my Language courses I make it a point to see a student tutor once a week just to have a no-stress situation to practice speaking and listening.
You might be able to do the same kinda thing for other courses, assuming they have some sort of homework/concept questions.
Aside from that, set a schedule. Determine beforehand what you think you can handle, giving yourself plenty of break time, but also giving yourself enough time to cover all the material. If you've got a test coming up that covers five chapters, start a week early and do a chapter a day.
For classes that include heavy critical thinking and mathematical logic, try and abstract what the professor is saying and think about it in your head. Make conjectures, try and figure out what the professor is going to say next. If you think the concept is a bit out of the scope of the class, go online and research it. When you're assigned problems by the professor, don't just open up your book and do all the problems in order. Instead, look at all the problems and group them in concepts. After you've grouped them by concepts, circle the hardest problems/the ones that focus mostly on the concepts. Start at the back of the question section and work your way to the front. Once again, focus on understanding the concepts rather than the number of problems completed. Pick a few of these problems and be sure you're able to finish these correctly with little to no trouble. If you're having difficulty solving one of these problems, then go back to the easiers warm up exercises and then go back to the hard ones.
As for classes that require a good bit of memorization, I find that if I write my lectures notes going left-to-right one line and then right-to-left the next that it forces me to read every single line instead of glossing over and skipping. Notes should be the important material that can be obtained by skimming so skimming the notes IMO is a bit unproductive. The right-to-left thing takes a while to get used and it's a bit weird, but it becomes no harder than writting your notes the "correct" way.
Oh, and when you do look over your notes and do your exercises, get as far away from the computer and distractions as possible. Researching related concepts is good and all, but there is a time and place for it.
Oooh, this. Don't just sit around semi-idly and take notes in lecture. Think about the concepts being presented and start the studying process right there in class.