Mamabee

Best Strategies for Students to Learn Better

Spending hour after hour bent down on a book reading isn’t effective studying. A study report by Science News for Students shows that students who often attain straight As spend less and less time studying than their counterparts. 

However, these students employ more creative and efficient studying methods than “Massed Sessions” or “Cramming.” Players in online casinos are also students that require the best strategies to beat the house and get the top True Blue casino no deposit bonus. Psychologists have been deducing which study habits would workout best and with whom for over 100 years. Here are the most common strategies that students can use to learn better. 

  • Pre-testing 
  • Spaced Practice 
  • Self-quizzing/ Active Retrieval Practice 
  • Interleaving 
  • Dual Coding/ Mixing graphics with text

Pre-Testing 

Pre-testing is the first step in the study cycle, according to Frank Christ. The Pre-test/ view step advises students to go through the material at least once before a teacher covers it in class. Accomplishing that step would make pre-testing much easier as the student already has an idea of the content. However, it further enhances one’s recall and understanding capacity as you learn the same thing, but in a different mode or practice. Plus, students benefit from the repetition of the task and the distribution if practising as well. Pretests studies or research indicates that students attain better results after a post-test. 

A pre-test aims to get everything wrong to test your memory capacity or capability. Students get a boost in esteem, depending on the complexity of the answers provided during the study session. It does not matter the amount of time spent on each quiz. What matters is the next step: confirming the answers given during a session or on your own. Plus, individuals tend to focus on the failures or wrong answers, and the correct ones stick to their minds. Kornell 2016 on Tandfonline indicates that finding the answers to a question you got wrong helps students learn more effectively. 

Spaced Practice 

According to the learning centre at the University of North Carolina, the spaced practice, also referred to as “Distributed Practice,” is one of the most successful study strategies for students. The practice indicates studying over shorter periods but on a more frequent basis. For instance, teachers can slot in review sessions for studies covered the previous day during the current class session. Students do not get extra time in class but end up retaining more information. 

If a student is practising spaced-out learning alone, one would need total commitment and discipline. The reason is that spaced learning means a learning session is approximately 20 minutes every day. However, instead of covering a single subject, students have to cover every class in 20 minutes for the whole day. The aim is to ensure that you retain complete focus during study periods, retain better information retention, and maintain a top position with your entire classwork. 

For instance, if handed a project lasting four hours, you can work an hour or 30 minutes each day until you complete it instead of waiting and doing it for four whole hours on the last day. Plus, using flashcards can work much better, according to studies conducted by Wissman and Rawson back in 2012. Flashcards enable students to remember card contents in a periodical review. 

Self-quizzing/ Active Retrieval Practice 

Reading and re-reading study materials isn’t practical and is ineffective. The ineffectiveness is because your memory isn’t trying to retrieve any data or information. Thus, your study strategy fails in the case of a test. Reading tricks the mind into believing that students learn essential skills or knowledge, but recalling that information becomes a challenge at the end of the day. 

Smith, in a study, advises students to “Put your class materials away, and then write out or maybe sketch or speak everything you know and try to be as thorough as possible, and then check your materials for accuracy.” He indicates that the process helps bring the information you just went through back to your mind. It is like a practical test you conduct on yourself. If doing it alone doesn’t suffice, try out study groups. Even parents at home can help students with this learning strategy. 

Once the active retrieval is complete, students should move to elaboration. Active retrieval is stating topics or subjects you just learned. However, in elaboration, students must go deeper and provide details for the topic under active retrieval. The process helps in connecting various contents and subjects, developing an understanding of any concept under study. 

Interleaving 

Repetition is not only dull but also tiring. Common knowledge, however, indicates that “Practice makes perfect.” Therefore, teachers ask students to keep practising and repeating the problem as many times as possible. But, studies show that continuous repetition is ineffective learning. Students should “Interleave,” that is, “mix their study materials to break up the monotony and boredom of studying a single problem.” Weinstein explains that doing a similar problem 5 or 20 times is not learning. But if you do five or ten different problems in succession and repeat, you can help students learn better. He says that the different order makes the challenge a little more complicated, and students will try varying strategies on each question step. He says that students will “be making more errors, but they’ll also be learning something significant, which is how to choose a particular strategy for each problem.” 

Dual Coding/ Mix Graphics with Text

Images are easier to identify and recollect than texts. By providing students with visual representations through study materials, you offer information in the form of an image and text. The study strategy isn’t about acquiring quality images but providing a proper depiction of the topic under study for students. A teacher can refer to visuals or images on websites, slideshow representations, or through a projector in a class. Casinos provide free pokies for players to practise strategies learned in books and the actual game. The visuals reinforce the study sessions by connecting study topics and what is depicted in the picture. As a result, students retain more after a study session with visuals or pictures than one without. 

Summary 

There are many study strategies to help students learn better. However, only a few have a scientific backup, including Pre-testing, Spaced Practice, Self-quizzing/ Active Retrieval Practice, Interleaving, and Dual Coding/ Mix Graphics with Text. These are most effective, and teachers can mix more than one strategy depending on the student’s ability. Students can pick any strategy that seems appropriate and try it at least once before reviewing the results and sticking with it!