Effective Study Skills

Effective Study Skills

Click on each book (skill ) to learn more about how you can use it!

Illusion of Fluency

Flashcards & Quizzing

Change it up!

Make it hard

growth mindset

1. Illusion of Fluency

Ever have that feeling that you’ve got this test aced, and then you go to do it and your heart drops through the floor. You don’t know what happened, you’d studied for hours, you paid attention and now, it’s like you’ve never seen these questions before. Your world was turned upside down. This is the illusion of fluency. It is the feeling of mastery when you have yet to attain it. The illusion of fluency strikes all of us at one point in time. The next time it strikes, embrace your growth mindset (remember that from the previous lesson?). What did you do that didn’t work and next time, what can you do differently? The gap between what you thought you knew and what you actually knew is usually caused by poor study skills. Such as, rereading your notes, highlighting your notes, rereading and highlighting your notes, copying your notes word for word, then highlighting and rereading. Learning, like running, is an active pursuit. The more times you store a memory, access it, retrieve it, store it, access it, and retrieve it the stronger that memory will be. Try summarizing your notes, identifying the key ideas, writing down questions, rephrasing key sections, guessing what may be on the next test. All of these require you to store, access and retrieve information.

2. Flashcards and Quizzing

Time tested and approved: flashcards, or self-quizzing, works. It works best when you start reviewing the flashcards at least 5+ days in advance of your test. This gives your brain enough time to store, access, and retrieve the memory. If you think of your brain like a road map, the more times you access a memory, the bigger the road gets. A new memory is like a deer path in the woods, your phone number is like a 10 lane highway. If you start the night before a test, your brain will not have time to build a road, let alone a highway. Instead of making flashcards you can also give yourself quizzes. Don’t like to make your own quizzes? No problem, use the information provided to you. Look at the learning objectives, could you answer them on a quiz after completing the lesson? Can you restate the definitions in the keywords from your text? Can you answer the questions at the end of the chapter in the textbook? Can you do the practice exercises without looking at the answers? All of these are forms of self-quizzing and will help to build those superhighways you need to ace your work. You've probably noticed that each topic in this orientation has a knowledge check quiz at the end of it. Now you know why :).

3. Change It Up!

If you don’t want to have a lopsided view of your skills, and you want to build those superhighways, you need to change up how you practice. Imagine you go to the batting cages to practice your swing. You spend an hour in the batting cages and you are smashing the ball as it comes out of the machine. You hop in the car, go to your game, and walk up to the plate thirty minutes later. Then you hit a ground ball to the first baseman. What happened? It turns out, when we do the same thing over and over again it feels successful but it probably isn’t. What happened is you got used to hitting the ball in the batting cages and then when you got to the field, everything was different. You had only practiced for one thing, and then got something unexpected. What would have helped was practicing hitting different types of pitches, thrown to different locations over the plate. In this scenario, when you get to the field you are prepared to hit a variety of pitches because that is what you practiced. It didn’t feel as good as the first example where you were smashing the ball but that’s okay, it was a better practice. How can you use this in the classroom? Easy, change up what you do to practice when you do it, and even where you do it. Review your history flashcards for thirty minutes, do your math homework, then shuffle the flashcards and study them again. In this scenario, you’ve given your brain a chance to forget what it thinks it knows and changed the order of the cards. In essence, you’ve changed up the pitches. Don’t reread your notes. That isn’t quizzing or studying, that is reading practice. Unless you are taking a reading test, find something else to do with your notes, like the Cornell note-taking system, perhaps? :)

Change up how you practice or study

4. Make It Hard

That’s right, make it hard. Learning should be difficult, after all, you are acquiring new knowledge and applying it in new ways. Learning how to ride a bike is hard but as the saying goes “It’s like riding a bike” which means that once you can do it, you never forget. Rereading your notes isn’t hard, it doesn’t tell you what you got right or wrong but it feels like work. All effort feels like purposeful effort. Just because it felt like effort doesn’t make it an effective or worthwhile use of your time. The goal is to find a place where you weave in work that you can do well, with work that you can’t do well. If you are struggling with some math problems and you want to throw something across the room. Stop. Close your math work and do work for another class. After you’ve spent a chunk of time away from your math work, go back and start with some easy math problems, then do a hard one, do some easier ones, then a hard one. Repeat as needed until you have mastered the skill. You’ve changed up how you practice and study and you’ve challenged yourself. All good things.

5. Growth Mindset

People are inherently bad judges at your own skills. We often overestimate our own ability. This is the illusion of fluency we identified earlier. To combat this trap, quiz yourself to really test what you do and don’t know. Make it challenging and mix up how you do it. The important thing is you remember to analyze what you did and then make changes using the information provided above to improve.