15 Tips and Tricks To Help Students Study Smart
Studying can sometimes be the most painful thing to do, especially when the topic is somewhat out of your league, but you still got to study that topic. You can do a few things to make it easier for your mind to grasp difficult-to-understand topics.
In this article, we have compiled a list of 15 important things which you may incorporate into your studying process, which will answer the age-old question of how to study smart whenever you find yourself at a learning halt. All of these points have been proven to enhance your learning and retention capabilities.
15 Tips To Help Students Study Smart
- Get Comfortable: You can’t expect the mind to learn if you’re uncomfortable with your sitting space or surroundings. Find yourself a quite well-lit area, and get to studying; try to avoid studying on your bed because we all know that it’s going to end up making you drowsy and you will learn nothing.
- Make a schedule and stick to it: In order to study smart, you have to take some time out of your day and be dedicated to studying. Make a schedule that involves at least a couple of hours that are solely dedicated to studying. Procrastination will do you no good here so stick to the schedule.
- Take Notes: It has been well-researched that making notes while you study helps with the rate of retention. Always keep a notebook handy while studying and keep noting down the points you find important or the points and questions that you find troublesome so that it is easier to come back to it while revising.
- Use a pen: While making notes in class or studying smart for the exam, it is always better to write with your own hands using a pen as opposed to on a laptop. Writing with a pen permits the mind to emphasize the words written, and as a result, you understand the topic or subject better. Plus, there’s a lesser chance of losing your notes.
- Look for illustrations: Illustrations, pictorial representations, tables, and diagrams always allow us to maintain a vivid image in our head and recall it later. Look for topics that seem important or difficult to understand and try to find their pictorial representation in order to understand them better; you can do this by looking through an alternate book or searching the term on the internet.
- Highlight what’s important: Always keep a highlighting pen or any normal pen with you while you study, and highlight the words and terms which are key to the topic or subject in the study. This allows your brain to link those words to the highlighted color and helps you recollect them a lot faster later while undertaking the exam.
- Focus on one thing at a time: Multitasking while studying is a myth because no matter how good you think your skills of handling multiple tasks at once are, it is always more productive to finish one task efficiently than doing several of them in a disorganized manner. In order to study smart, try to get rid of all distractions and put your total focus on the subject you are studying. Concentration improves learning abilities and also enhances the degree to which you are able to understand the topic.
- Set realistic goals: You must set goals about how many topics you are hoping to cover in one sitting. That being said, your goals must always be realistic so as not to put a lot of stress on your mind, do go after studying through the whole syllabus in one night. Try to set goals, select the topics that need your utmost attention, and perfect them. Set goals with respect to topics in study or in terms of your learning ability, and not as per the time. Concentrate on one particular subject, perfect it and then move to the next. You can always come back to the ones about which you have doubts on.
- Try to make a connection with the topic: Always try to visualize the topic and try to understand the meaning behind it and how it may be of help in your life. This allows for a better understanding. Make a link with a topic such that is stays in your mind, and you can easily recollect it at any particular instance. For instance: If you are studying algebra, try to visualize the equations by substituting the variables with something else or a real-life problem.
- Take breaks where necessary: It is important not to tire yourself while studying, as the more stressed you get, the less knowledge you retain. Take breaks in between while studying when you feel tired to keep your energy levels high. It is also important to eat right while studying as it is well-researched that the right nutrition help in better learning.
- Test your Skills: Undertake mock tests to check how well you can apply your learning abilities. Try to complete the test in a set amount of time to get used to the pressure of time that you go through while actually going through the exam. It allows you to identify your shortcomings and the areas that need your focus to improve on them.
- Study with others: Studying with others is a smart study approach, as it will increase your comprehensive abilities, as while studying with other people, there is a sense of competitiveness, which enhances your learning capabilities and focus. It also helps if you teach a topic to a friend, as it clears your own doubts and enables you to see a topic from an examiner’s point of view, which helps in increasing the quality of the content to score maximum marks.
- Sleep on it: It is very crucial that you include adequate rest time in your studying schedule since the mind can only comprehend so much in one go. It is equally important to give the mind proper rest by sleeping for at least 6 hours so that the brain has ample time to absorb all of the knowledge. This improves your understanding of the topic and allows you better recollect it at a later stage.
- Mugging Up will do you no good!: Don’t mug up the whole syllabus at once; instead, give each topic proper time as per its difficulty level and the prerequisite knowledge that you may already have about it. Cramming long answers always reduces the level of understanding and makes it very hard to recollect it later on as the mind has not fully comprehended the topic. Every examiner looks for relevancy in your answers and how well you have displayed your critical thinking skills. Therefore, learning the topic by giving it sufficient time is better because, when you go through a topic multiple times, it makes sense without you even realizing it.
- When in doubt, revise!: Lastly, revise! This is no big revelation as you may have been told a million times in school to always revise the syllabus before go through with the exam. Revising means going through the topics which you have learned and remembering the key points about every topic or question so as to answer them in your exam better. Even if you don’t know much about a certain topic, you can always get better at the topics you do know and make them your strong points; this increases your confidence level before the exam or test.
The points mentioned in the above list will always help you and enable you to understand how to study smart.
The points mentioned in the above list will always help you and enable you to understand how to study smart. In case you are still worried about studying for your exam, or if you can’t take out the time to study with all the classes and strict deadlines for your assignments, we can take care of that for you. We can assist you with your assignments and essays through our academic writing services, which can ensure that you get adequate time to study for your exam and give you peace of mind. We have 4000+ subject matter experts, each specializing in their own field of academics, so they can handle any specific requirement of the university, as most of them have been doing this for more than a decade. For more information, check out the samples available on our website on every field of academics you can possibly think of.
Hope this article helped you learn how to study smart and how to enhance your retention capabilities, and increase your learning efficiency.
