Welcome to part three of organizing and prioritizing your studies. This third and
final section will basically be answering the question 'how to study' or
'how to study most effectively'. When do you think is the best time to study?
Most people would suggest that you study early, sometime in the morning and
afternoon, perhaps between classes, when you have time. The reason is you would not
want to be studying late at night when you are more likely to be tired and less
likely to learn the material. Then the next question would be where should you
study? Well, that could vary, but one thing you definitely want to consider is
studying in isolation. You don't have to study in isolation all the times because
sometimes there could be study groups that could be very beneficial and other
group study activities, but a lot of times, at least most the time, you're
probably going to want to study in isolation. That way you're not distracted by other
people and you can focus on learning the course material. Now how long do you
think you should study for at any given time? The best answer is no more than 50
minutes stretch of studying. Now why is that? We're gonna click on this link and
I'm going to show you this nice chart. This is a great open-access textbook and
here we have this nice chart that talks about the effects of massed versus
distributed practice on learning. Massed means this big session here,
whereas these are more distributed. You'll notice here we have three
different students. We have Leslie who studies for a half hour, LeAnn who studies
for one hour, and Nora who studies for four hours. We also have their grades
here.Who has the highest grade? Leslie and that's because she's breaking up the
tasks of studying into smaller tasks. Now a B is still a pretty good grade, so
that's why we say no more than fifteen minutes on our slide.
You may want to consider studying for smaller amounts of time and then taking
a break. Some of that may be, as I have heard, that we tend to remember the
first and the last thing, so Leslie has more first and last to remember than
Leanne and Norah does; therefore, she learns more of the material and is able
to get a higher grade. Once you study for 50 minutes then you should
take a break. How long should your breaks be?
Usually 5 or 10 minutes is
good. Of course if you have other things that are scheduled on your calendar and
task list you may end up doing it or having a longer break sometimes. What should
you do when you study? Well, the big thing is is you should pre-plan what you will
do during study time. Usually when we're talking about study time we're
including reading, course assignments, completing assignments, as well as doing
review for quizzes and exams and practicing recalling and retrieving
information from your own memory. We're gonna look at another chart to
help understand why the studying and review is important. Let me find the
right one. For some reason it's not showing up, so we won't be able to use
this one. Let me bring another one up. Let me just go to Google and bring up
another - I didn't want the calendar -
Here's another one that illustrates the same purposes I want to
show you. Once you learn something you almost immediately
start to forget what you learned. If you're learning/reading chapter
one and four weeks later you have to take an exam you're not going to
remember much of it, but if you review, then you're going to remember more of it
and forget less of it. Each one of these different colors is a review
session, so you see, if you
review then you have forgotten less. You review again, you've forgotten even less
and you review more now you're going to retain more of the information. That's
why review is important because you need to battle this forgetting curve that
just naturally occurs in humans. You do that by studying and reviewing the
course material, so you're forgetting less of it and you'll have more learned,
so you're ready to do that on the quiz or exam. Some more study tips. These come
from "How to Win at College: Surprising Secrets for Success from the Country's
Top Students" by Cal Newport which is available in the library with another
book of his as well. What Cal Newport did, is he went to Harvard, and he
interviewed lots of students - good students - who were getting good grades,
who were successful to figure out what were they doing so he could then do it
himself and be a successful student. He had found that students have a plan,
which is what we just talked about on the last slide as well, but those
students plan out what, how, and how long, you know those chunks of time that
they're going to study before they take a break. He also finds that successful
students would schedule free time and friend time, but they would not do it in
between classes and that's because they didn't want to get distracted. They would
use that time in between classes to review work from class because, you can
see, if you review something after class you're going to remember more of
it than if you waited to review. So they're starting that review process
early. They start studying in weeks in advance. They don't wait until
the night before an exam to then study all the course material.
They they do it in chunks throughout the semester. Another thing students do is
they find a productive study spaces. Study spaces where they could study
and learn and get assignments done. They would usually study alone. Many
of them would have secret study spaces, because they didn't want friends to find
them, because they know it's easy for a friend
to come along and say 'hey let's go grab a coffee' and usually that sounds like
more fun than studying in some cases. They didn't want to be enticed, so they
had secret spaces that they wouldn't even tell their best friend about just
so they can get their studying done. Another thing that successful students
did is they did coursework every day of the week. Remember earlier when we looked
at that block schedule and we had nothing blocked out for study time on
Friday, Saturday, or Sunday? A successful student going to Harvard that
Cal Newport may have interviewed said that they do coursework every day.
They never take a day off. They do something, maybe they don't do a lot, but
they do something. Those students there would also start big projects the
day that they are assigned. You get an essay that you have to write, you start
something that night. You don't have to have a full draft. Maybe they just
brainstorm an outline or if you have a big research project they might use
one of those assignment calculators and break those chunks down. They, at
least, take the first step as soon as they get started so they're not
surprised when time gets away from them.
They take those big assignments and they break it down into
smaller tasks. If you had to write a short paper, instead of doing it all in
one day, they would do it in three. They might brainstorm an outline,
then they would draft, and then they would spend the next night revising it,
and then they would be able to turn in a good quality project. They had also set
arbitrary deadlines. These aren't deadlines that your teacher sets. These
are deadlines that they give themselves. Possibly to break up these big projects
into smaller tasks or take three days to write a short paper and they would
make sure those deadlines they probably write them in a calendar most likely to
make sure that they're getting all of those done. So that right there are a
bunch of great study tips that will hopefully help you. This is a list
of our sources, so you would want to click on just the Google slides to
review and then you can click on these and go to them as well as any other ones
that you saw throughout the presentation. I hope at this point, as a result of
watching all three parts of Organizing and Prioritizing Your Studies, that
you hopefully are becoming more aware of how you manage your time. That you're
able to list some options for managing time and study tasks. If you don't
remember what those are, check out part 2 and to list the best amount of time to
study before taking a break. That was in part 3. If you're not sure what that is,
you may want to review that now. If you have any questions, please post to the
discussion post in the Academic Success canvas course. Find the module Organizing
and Prioritizing Your Studies and you can ask questions there as well as share
what works well for you. When we do this workshop in person students love
hearing what other students do well and it gives them ideas and allows them to
talk and share. You don't have to take the survey since you're online, but
you may want to take the quiz to, again, test your knowledge about what you've
learned as a result of watching these videos. Have a great day.