This article is for students of all kinds who want to get better at studying. I will cover preparation for study, taking notes, listening skills, mnemonics, copying notes, approaches to homework, asking questions, and studying for tests.
Learning to study is learning to
learn.
This article is for students, whether you are just starting out in
high school or college, a re-entry student, or an eternal student who wants
your life-long vocation to be a little easier.
Learning to learn is far more
important than learning the dates, the formulae or the important names in any given class. If you learn to study and do research, you can learn anything
that can be found in books or lectures. You may decide you don’t want to be
an electrical engineer after you’ve tried it a few years. If you know how to
learn, you can much more easily follow your dreams. This article will introduce
you to the art of studying. It’s a simple art and anyone can learn to do it.
These methods have been
field-tested. Some were picked up in “Re-entry classes.” Others were learned
from fellow students and even a very self-educated spouse. Everyone who
contributed to these ideas was an A student.
They are also people who love to learn. It’s easy to love something when
you are good at it.
These ideas can be
boiled down to: “If you interact with a fact or idea at least three times in
different ways, you’ll have it safely filed and accessible in your brain”. In
other words, you have learned it.Interact is the important part; it
means you engage with the material being offered to you. Simply listening to a
lecture will not do it. Mindlessly scribbling the words you hear won’t work.
They’ll slide right over the top of your brain on their way from one ear to the
other.