Organizing/Prioritizing Studies Part 3: How to Study

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.