In a system where you learn most of the stuff you learn in an environment of your choice looking for methods to improve your learning makes a lot of sense. Here we gathered some actions you can take to improve your studying quality and get better results right away. Lets not waste any time and begin.
Leave your phone out of sight.
Leaving your phone somewhere you can’t use it has proven to improve your memory accuracy in this study.
“Participants who had their smartphone out of sight formed the ‘Absent’ or low-phone salience (LS) condition, and the other group had their smartphone placed next to them throughout the study, ‘Present’ or high-phone salience (HS) condition. ”
The most frequently used features on participants’ phones were social media(43%), communication(31%), and entertainment(17%) and the rest may have been used for learning purposes so I am not including those (web surfing, calculator etc.) in this text. If you go on your phone and check your screen time you will probably be greeted by similar percentages.
From looking at this data we can say we shouldn’t keep any device that can be used to access these features in our sight while we are in a situation we rely on our memory accuracy the most.
You could experiment with this method by leaving your phone in another room or by just making it much harder to access the mentioned features and figure out which method works the best for you since many students today use online learning resources that help them learn more easily.
Protégé effect: Learn to teach
Every successful student that I remember I’ve talked to has noticed the same pattern. “Study, revision, teach.”
Studying and revising are good, many of you are already aware of this. However what you probably haven’t tried is trying to teach someone else the topics you’ve studied, pretending to teach or preparing to teach. You can do it online, in class even by yourself acting as if you are teaching someone else.
This is called the protégé effect. A psychological phenomenon. It would help if you actually knew you are going to teach the information you are learning to someone at some point after you are done learning it.
Test your knowledge repeatedly
In this study, participants first took a pretest (average score was 36%) and were then assigned to a group which was either “repeated short answer quizzing”, ”repeated studying” or “no further exposure to the materials”. After 5.5 months, a final test was taken covering all the information to get the results of this study.
Their performances on the final test were;
Repeated short answer quizzing: 55%
Repeated studying: 46%
No further exposure to the materials: 44%
Even though many would expect repeated studying to be as good as repeated short quizzing, the quiz group sees which parts of their subject they need to practice more. For short answer quizzing, you could use a flashcard app such as “Anki” which is a free and open source app that has a big community of students using it so it's really easy to find materials of all kinds of subjects that you would have to create yourself otherwise.
You decide what is best for you.
After everything you've read, this is essentially what you should keep in your mind the most.
People have different motivations, and many of you have already realized the fire of motivation gets extinguished fast. The most important thing you need to have is tenacity. If you want to have something just keep on doing what it requires you to do.
Study well now, whoever you are hope you achieve your goals.
