Study Skills to help you get further faster!

WITH the development of communication technology, the growing trend in home-schooling and ongoing lockdown orders, the burden of ‘study’ and how it’s most effectively achieved has moved from the traditional school setting to the home. So, these study Skills are here to help you get further faster!

Getting an education therefore increasingly means also knowing how to go about being educated.

Thankfully, the basic principles of study remain as effective today as they have ever been and here are three simple tips:

1. Consistency – Set a study schedule and stick to it. No matter what the topic, regularly turning your attention to what you need to know will form a habit and reduce the burden on you to be ‘motivated’. Depending on the complexity of the topic and the tasks you have to complete, studies show that habits can be formed in three to eight weeks so starting early is a good idea but more than anything else, it’s a matter of consistently returning to what you want to study. Soon enough, it becomes an almost intuitive part of your thought process putting you ahead of the game before you even start.

2. Repetition – Not to be confused with being consistent, repetition refers to performing the same tasks at least three times in order to speed up retention and recollection. This means that you should always have a pen/pencil and pad with you when you’re reading so that you can

i) read the information,

ii) highlight the information in the book itself (effectively reading it again) and

iii) write out either the quote, the page reference or the notes to remind you of that particular section. The third is the most important step here since the conscious act of re-writing the texts ‘translates’ the words into your own ‘voice’ making it easier to remember. Plus every note you make in either your textbook or notepad becomes a permanent reference point saving you the trouble of having to leaf through pages every time you try to find something.

3. Care – This may be the most important and yet the most basic and undervalued aspect of study. The school system has generally just assumed that everyone who attends actually cares about what they’re studying so there is little or no need to make the actual subjects seem interesting: ‘it’s ‘knowledge’ after all; who wouldn’t be interested?’

The truth is that while the assumption is both arrogant and inaccurate, the premise is true. We memorise song lyrics, twitter handles and the details of our friends’ lives in enormous quantities and with relative ease but this is because it’s all information we think is important to us or something we care about. So, if ever there were a cheat code to study it’s just a matter of finding something, almost anything, in what you’re studying or even why you’re studying, that matters to you. Once you’ve found it, pursue it comfortable in the knowledge that with repetition and consistency, there won’t be much you won’t understand.

We hope you enjoyed this article “Study Skills to help you get further faster!”.

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