Regardless of whether you are a formal student, learning a new job skill, or exploring something on your own, learning always continues throughout your life. However, many of us stick to the same studying techniques we picked up years ago, not knowing if they help us achieve the best results. Learning doesn’t happen best when you keep reading your notes over and over or wait till the night before your exam to study. Good news is that cognitive science and educational psychology have presented techniques that can make learning and remembering information much easier. You’re not limited to better learning by just putting in more study hours; The idea is to learn with methods that take advantage of how our brain works. Avoiding common time traps, like getting drawn into an exciting aviator game parimatch session when you should be reviewing material, is part of building effective study habits. Let’s see some methods and tools vetted by science that can better your study experience.
Active Recall: Testing Your Memory
One way to study efficiently is by asking yourself questions, also called the testing effect. When you actively recall, you try to pull information out from your memory, instead of just reading over it. You can review by testing your knowledge with questions, working with flashcards, or describing a topic without looking back at what you wrote down. Retrieving information by yourself helps you keep the memory of it and make it easier to access later. It also highlights areas where you lack knowledge and highlight where you should improve. While re-reading seems to help, actively trying to recall information will demonstrate exactly what you can remember and recall at a given time. If you make it a main aspect of your study plan, you will improve how much you remember.
Spaced Repetition: Timing Your Review
Spacing out your review of information over a period of time is also a helpful technique. Rather than studying everything all at once, you come back to the material from time to time to help you remember it just when you’re about to forget. This method works by taking advantage of the forgotten information each day. Looking over your notes every so often requires your brain to search for the info, making it easier to memorize. Several apps and software are available to help you use spaced repetition with flashcards, so you can easily put this strategy to work in your studies. Studying again and again a little at a time is more successful for remembering something over a long period than studying everything at once.
Interleaving: Mixing Up Subjects
You might think it best to focus on one subject at a time, but studies have shown that reviewing several subjects together at once can improve how well you learn. It helps your brain switch from one idea to another, which in turn helps you tell the differences and use the proper method. The main effort in interleaving is greater at first when compared with blocking, but it sooner leads to more reliable and versatile recall of the information. Problems in real life are not separated and ordered by subject like they are in school, so the same happens in EDS. Getting into the habit of combining different types of knowledge in unusual situations helps build your cognitive flexibility.
Elaboration: Connecting New Information
Elaboration means tying the new information to the things you have learned before. In order to learn, try making new ideas connect to things you already know or things you have experienced. Ask questions to understand what and how the material relates to a topic. As a result, you can remember the information more easily and find it more significant. Some simple examples of elaboration are creating concept maps, describing ideas using your own words, or teaching them to someone else. If you can build many links between new knowledge and what you already know, the information will be easy to recall later on.
Conclusion
Achieving your learning goals requires replacing old and ineffective habits with ones that science shows to be effective. Don’t rely on just looking things up; remember them through active recall. Pick time points in between reviews to support memory through spacing them out, introduce different topics to your studying, and link the new material to what you already know to help yourself improve. By using these strategies, you need to pay attention more, but you will gain much better understanding and remembrance of the material. Employing these strategies can save you time when studying, lower your frustration level, and allow you to learn new knowledge and skills more efficiently.
