There is so much to learn and it is likely that you will be learning
for the rest of your life. School is simply a kick starter. No matter
what path you take in life after school, learning will be part of it.
Yet, the forever journey to develop your talents doesn’t have to be
nerve-racking or unpleasant. Comfort comes from knowing that you have
the competence to quickly ramp up on new topics and grasp them deeply.
Whatever else you are learning in school, you also need to practice
study skills that will make you a competent learner.
Don’t think that study skills are just about how to do well in school.
A solid base of study skills and study tips is even more useful after
you leave school, when you continue learning on your own.
Here are the 5 study skills that are believed to be the most effective
by researchers:
1. Elaborative interrogation (Asking “Why”): A great way to learn is
to ask yourself questions. Little kids know this intuitively, as they
run around asking “Why, why, why?” A great deal of research has proven
that the kids are on to something. Getting students to answer
questions, such as “Why is this fact true?” aids learning. The main
reason asking “why” questions seems to work is that it encourages you
to integrate the new fact with things you already know. Doing so
improves your memory for the new fact by giving you more “hooks” to
find it. Research also suggests that some ways of questioning yourself
work better than others.
2. Self-Explanation: The idea behind self-explanation as a reading
strategy is to pause from reading your textbook periodically and
explain to yourself what it means to you. You can do this after a
section of text, or when studying an example problem. When trying to
self-explain, you may find that you need to look back over parts of
the text to fully understand what’s being said. Professor Micki Chi
offers a nice account of why self-explanation works. Her ideas were
published as a chapter in the book, Advances in Instructional
Psychology. The idea is that self-explaining encourages you to make
inferences based on what you are reading. You don’t just summarize the
text, but say a little more than what was in it. As you try to
explain, you also identify problems and so revise your explanation.
These serve to enrich and repair your understanding.
3. Practice testing: The main idea behind practice testing is that
actively testing your memory improves learning far more than passively
reviewing material. Tests are not just for evaluation anymore. Testing
improves learning by exercising memory retrieval. When you answer a
test question, you have to actively search your long-term memory.
Doing so creates more and better pathways to the answer. This makes
the answer easier to find the next time around. Scientists sometimes
call it, “retrieval practice.” Practice testing is easy to do. You can
make flash cards or answer questions from your textbook. You can often
find free practice tests online. Make sure you can get the correct
answers. Practice testing works best when you can find out whether got
the answers right or wrong.
4. Distributed Practice: You have a test coming up, oh say, tomorrow.
You haven’t studied at all. Should you cram for it? Sure. And, good
luck. For the next time, you’d really do better to space your studying
out over the time you have. Do a little at a time over several study
sessions. That’s the idea behind distributed practice. One reason
distributed practice aids learning is that you have to re-start your
memory for the topic during each study session. Once your memory for
the topic is warmed up and moving, doing more is fairly easy. Like a
car coasting downhill, it’s too easy. Stopping and starting is harder
on your memory. That’s good (unlike the car), because it strengthens
your memory. Distributed practice seems to work regardless of how you
go about studying. Yet, you can do best by combining it with practice
testing. Don’t be mad at your instructor for giving you lots of
quizzes. They give you a double dose of good learning. Try (and try
again) to get in the habit of doing it yourself!
5. Interleaved Practice: When studying math, you need to learn a few
different kinds of formulas. For example, you learn one equation to
compute the area of a circle. You learn another to figure out the
perimeter. The idea behind interleaved practice is that you are better
off mixing some area problems with some perimeter problems when you
study. The reason this works is that you need to learn a bit more than
how to apply each formula. You also need to learn when to use one
formula and when to use another. When you see a new problem, you first
have to figure out what kind of problem it is. By interleaving the
problems during your study sessions, you give yourself practice at
telling the problems apart.
Conclusion: Based on the research to date, these five study skills all
work quite well. The team who reviewed the research recommended a
couple of these 5 study skills more strongly than the others. The main
reason is that the team would like to see even more research to answer
a few additional questions. It’s not that the researchers know for
sure that some of these study skills work X% better than others. I
mention this because some summaries of the paper may give that wrong
impression.
