From the young years, children acquire a wrong representation of effective study skills. However, the more you spend time learning, the better knowledge you gain. However, they don’t usually understand that time with a book without understanding it doesn’t give knowledge. Even in high school, students continue ineffective studying, while they enhance their free time. The following list is about the most common bad habits that disturb students. Find one that you have already.
1. Passive Learning
Reading some passages from the textbook is a good step to start learning, but reading is only passive learning. For effective learning, you should be active with the information from the textbook. Try to understand the information by writing, reading, drawing, and answering questions to remember it.
2. Learning without Organization
Every topic in your study program is usually divided into categories or building blocks. Always try to pay attention to the way the information is presented to you. Take some time to understand the structure and it will be much easier to memorize the material.
For example, in math, the information may be organized in steps. Moreover, to understand the fourth step, you should first read and understand the previous three steps. For the social sciences, you need to understand the categories or topics that are presented in the text. For example, chapters of the topic may be governments, customs, or more. Usually, chapters have similar patterns, so you can create comparison charts that help you organize information in a suitable way. Use compare, contrast, and contextualization methods that will be a great help when you will be writing the exam.
3. Cramming
Have you ever crammed on the subject just before the exam? Do you know that even if you do well on the exam, the crammed information will flow away just the next day after the exam? Remember, that the more you reread the information, the more you memorize it. Start preparing for the exam a couple of weeks in advance to be sure to get the A grade!
4. Skipping the Recommended Literature
Most students don’t look through the books that are recommended for preliminary reading before the classes. Some of them don’t even know about the existence of this list. Reading the recommended literature gives a background for better understanding the topic that will be discussed in the lecture or seminar.
5. Falling to See the Images
Stop glazing over the charts and illustrations that are placed in your reading. These visuals are valuable sources of information that can help you understand and memorize the information. Work with images and you will see how they may help.