5 Most effective study techniques

A solid base of study techniques is essential if you want to improve your knowledge and learn new information. If you are struggling to study and are wasting your time on strategies that don’t work then you should definitely take note of these 5 effective study techniques:

Ask why?

Asking why encourages you to learn new information and improves your memory. You should question every new fact you learn in order to gain more details and expand on your knowledge. You can get your answer by asking your tutor or doing your own further research.

Self-Explanation

Trying to explain what you have learnt will prove that you have understood the information. You should pause from your course materials or reading after a section of text and try to explain what you have just revised. Summarising what you have learnt in 10 bullet points will help with this and make it easier to read back through your notes at a later date.

Practice testing

Practice testing is a great way to test your memory. This technique improves your learning far more than just reading your course materials and allows you to work your brain by searching your long-term memory. Doing this makes the answer easier to find the next time around. Practice testing can be in the form of flash cards, answering questions from your course materials or mock exams.

Distribute your studying

Studying a little bit at a time throughout your course duration will help retain information easier as you will constantly be going over it. This then strengthens your memory. Spacing your studying will not only enable you to do better, but you’ll also remember the information you studied for a lot longer.  So stop the late night cramming sessions and start planning!

Highlighting

Highlighting is a great way to connect important ideas together. It allows us to not just mentally memorise the information, but visually remember it too. The more connections you make the better you will remember. You should use more than one colour when studying in order to create a simple system, but don’t get carried away! You should aim to highlight no more than 20% - 30% of your work.