3 Ways to Improve Your Study Sessions

Studying for a test can be frustrating. You feel like you are just reading and re-reading the same things over again and not really understanding how you are going to be tested. You feel like you just don’t understand the material the way you think you are going to be tested. It is a lot of fear and anxiety controlling your study process. Here are 3 things you can do to improve your study sessions to be more satisfying and successful.

1. Study a little bit of everything every day.
   
   Develop a schedule that has you studying all of your classes every day. Daily exposure to a class’s content will lead to better long-term retention. Better long-term retention leads to more success on homework and exams. More success leads to more confidence. With confidence one can tackle a class in the most successful way possible!
   
   It may be tempting to drop your study sessions for all your other classes when there is an exam in one of your classes is looming. Work to avoid that temptation. When you start the cram for one exam putting everything else on the back burner, then you will have to do the same for all of your classes for all of the exams.
   
   It can be scary to trust daily studying to prepare you for big exams while not exclusively cramming for that one upcoming exam. You just need to take the first step. With it will come a sense of completion and success. This will make it easier to do the same for each and every exam that is to come.
   
2. Create yourself study guides.
   
   Watching videos and reading books only gets you so far. In fact, it is one of the most time-consuming ways you can study, while also achieving the least amount of retention possible. Watching and reading are passive learning techniques. Engaging in these activities does not allow you to process information, but rather you end up working on rote memorization of material. Rote memorization is well known to be ineffective for exams that expect you to apply information to new scenarios (which tend to be what professors and some standardized tests are looking for).
   
   Take the time to break down your class notes into “one-sheeters”. Split things into subtopics which work well together. Limit yourself to one piece of paper (landscape), four colors, diagrams, and bullet points with 5 words or less. Imagine these are the notes you would put on the board for a class in which you are teaching others how to understand the content. Not only do you create yourself a study guide, but you are actively processing the information rather than passively reviewing it.
   
3. Study with others
   
   There are so many things you can gain when studying with others. Two things you are try are mock teaching and generating practice tests.
   
   Mock Teaching: If you can teach it, you can understand it. Divide the content among you are your cohort and each of you should prepare to teach the group the content. You will be required to make sure what you are teaching makes sense to your “students”. This will require you to truly embrace the content and understand at a level which is far more fluent.
   
   Generate Practice Tests: Many teachers don’t provide practice tests. This can be frustrating, especially if you don’t know the professors and are basically looking at a surprise for the first exam. When you have a study group, you can have each of the people in the study group prepare 1-2 (or more depending on the number of folks in the study group) practice test questions. Combine these all together and you have a practice test. Also, the act of writing the question and answers is as instructive (if not more so) is invaluable to your understanding the content. Generating multiple choice answers that people are willing to fall for is an art form on its own, and thus can be very instructive.