8 Best Study Tips To Keep You On Track This School Year

College courses have just begun, so I expect that your work-load has started to pile up as a result. Before the work-load gets too high, it is best that you start crunching some information now. You wouldn’t want to have to cram and pull an all-nighter later on! Not only is that bad for your health, but it also isn’t really an effective method for learning the material. So start hitting the books now and begin using one of these 8 best study tips! These are the best study tips because they are easy, effective, and will guarantee you an A in your classes. Read on to find out how to secure the report card of your dreams! You would be surprised at how just a few changes to your study-life could make all the difference to what you are able to achieve. 

1. Re-Write Your Notes

Writing your notes may help you to learn the material, but re-writing your notes will help you to retain the material. Studies have shown that when you handwrite your notes rather than type them,  you are more likely to remember the material. When you first take notes, you are just focused on jotting down all of the information before the professor moves on to the next topic and that is why you must re-write your notes, so that you can actually focus on understanding the material you are writing down. Writing it down will also allow the information to be transferred into your mind via muscle memory. The overall point is that writing your notes down may be a good tip for getting those coveted A’s in your classes, but it is not enough. Take some extra time out of your day to re-write your notes and you will be thanking yourself for it later!

2. Put Up Sticky Notes

Writing the lessons that you need to learn onto sticky notes and then putting them around the house is one of the best study tips I could possibly offer. Having sticky notes posted everywhere will allow you to be conveniently reminded of the material. After all, how can you possibly forget the material when it is plastered all over your house?

3. Set Up A “Study Time” Alarm

If you are anything like me, you will say you are going to study but then get distracted and so you never really get to it. This is not a very helpful habit if you want to get A’s in your classes. To ensure that you will actually sit down and study, set up study alarms so that you are kept accountable. It is also helpful to set a timer for 1 hour so that you can devote yourself to your work for an allotted set of time. If you have a timer, you can tell yourself, “Well, it is only 1 hour of my entire day, I can get through studying the material for at least that long.” Chances are though that when you sit down and start studying, you won’t want to stop until the material clicks in your head. 

4. Form A Study Group

Sometimes when you are trying to study alone, you can easily get distracted. You may find yourself reaching for your phone so that you can scroll through your IG feed or get lost in all of the Twitter posts. Studying with a group makes learning the material fun and you will be surrounded by people that will keep you on track!

5. Review The Material Within 24 Hours

The best study tip that my professor made sure to drill into everyone’s head was to study the class material within 24 hours of first learning about it. If you do that, you are sure to remember the material much more easily. Your recall of the material decreases exponentially the longer you choose to put off reviewing.  

6. Highlight Key Points

Highlighting certain key-terms will help them to stick out better in your mind. You can even highlight information based on certain groupings. For instance, in a science class, you can highlight all of the terms having to do with photosynthesis green and all of the terms having to do with the Krebs cycle yellow.  Grouping the important terms you need to learn according to category and highlight color will allow you to recall the information more easily since the information won’t be scattered, it will be organized. 

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7. Visualize The Material

One of the best study tips that my friend told me about was to imagine different pieces of information being stored in different parts of your home. For example, imagine walking down the hallway to your cabinet and opening it and finding a notecard that says, “the mitochondria is the power-house of the cell,” now imagine yourself heading to your bedroom and looking under the bed and finding a notecard that says, “ATP is your body’s currency for energy.” It is easy for our minds to recall locations, as we are naturally attuned to identifying landmarks. Associating the information with different locations will essentially cause your mind to “land-mark,” or rather “bookmark,” the material.  

8. Teach The Material

You can’t really tell if you know the material until you are confident that you are able to teach it. Sometimes you may think that you understand a certain concept but then when you are asked to explain it, suddenly you are at a loss for words. Also, ever notice how it is always much easier to remember a conversation than it is to remember a lecture? Teaching the material will allow you to remember the material as though it were actually a conversation. You will remember yourself talking about the information and that will make it easier to recall it so that you can ace your classes!

Walk into the classroom, or join in on the Zoom call, with confidence that you will ace your tests by using one of these 8 best study tips. Let us know which of these 8 best study tips you are dying to try out first in the comments below!

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