Project Study Skills

How to Understand Better: Structuring In the previous section we understood how learning occurs when you make connections between information and relate it to what you already know. The spider web analogy is a great tool to understand this. Every time you learn something new, you begin to form associations and place it in your web of association in a way that relates to the knowledge surrounding it. Hence, forming a bigger picture of how it's relation. When you think about something you begin to think in clusters of ideas, if you are thinking about School, you may not only think about the word, you begin to think about your journey to school, your friends, your teachers, all the good and not so good memories you have associated with it. Mind maps better notes - reading sentences takes lots of time- use sketch noting as a picture is worth a thousand words Testing Mixing

Rehearsal Rehearsal is one of the two aspects of learning i.e. rehearsal and remembering (retrieval).  Rehearsal is the repetition of information again and again to maintain it in the working memory or to aid it's transfer to the Long Term Memory. Rehearsal can be divided into maintenance rehearsal and elaborative rehearsal .  Maintenance Rehearsal (Rote Memorization) Maintenance rehearsal aka. rote memorization is done by simple repetition of information without linking it to previous knowledge or by adding meaning to it.   This will keep the information in the Working Memory (Short Term Memory). By pure repetition of the information, it can be kept in the short term memory forever until the cycle is broken.  Although rote memorization is good for quick recalling of facts and it helps develop fundamental knowledge, it may have several drawbacks. As rote memorization doesn...

Learning is an important aspect of our lives. Not only does it make us more flexible, it also keeps us updated in a rapidly changing environment. If you were to relate the human brain to the computer then learning would be the software update. Just as we keep our electronic devices updated with the latest software to prevent obsolescence. Similarly, it is critical to keep ourselves up to date through continuous learning. Just as our gadgets become more efficient as technology progresses so should our learning strategies. As students our purpose of studying is to stimulate learning in our brains. Not all forms of studying lead to learning. So it's necessary that we understand what learning is and how it occurs.  Two main goals of learning are: 1. Take in new information in a form that your brain can process 2. Retrieve the information to solve problems But how exactly does learning take place?  Successful learning is a...

Schools teach us what to study but they only go so far in teaching us how to do it. We typically pick up our study methods from our classmates or from what seem the most popular study tactics, however it turns out that many of these ways are actually rather ineffective. These tactics undoubtedly do work, but are highly inefficient and may even be holding us back from attaining our true learning potential. We do a lot of planning and reasoning before taking certain important decision, but when it comes to selecting our learning strategies we try to figure it out ourselves or do what seems to be easy without even questioning their effectiveness and efficiency. We keep applying these strategies even when they fail produce the desired results. Before questioning our strategies we question our own lack of aptitude for learning and acquire beliefs that cause us to doubt our abilities and say things such as, "I'm ...