Study Prof

1. Nap time is good for us. Sleep plenty at night and take a nap during the day if you need it. The average person needs about 8 hours per night, but some need more and some need less. Stress in your life–physical, mental, or emotional–will often increase your need for sleep (though it may make sleep more difficult). If possible try to go to sleep at the same time each night and allow your body to wake up on its own.
2. Recess is everyone’s favorite subject. Exercising your body exercises your brain. Check out the research. Regular physical exercise makes your brain work better. Not only should you work up a sweat four or five times a week, get your blood flowing regularly during each study session. Get up and walk around the block or shoot some hoops every 45 minutes or so when studying. You’ll really be able to see a difference in how well your brain is working.
3. Work a little, play a little. Small, regular study sessions are best; much better than study marathons. In general, studying an hour every day is much better than studying for seven hours once a week. Similarly, studying for thirty minutes twice a day is better than studying for an hour once a day. The more you live with the information the more likely it will be available when you need it.
4. It’s easy to learn someone’s name if you see them every day. Regular review is the key to transferring information from your short term memory to your long term memory. For example, study for thirty minutes and take a five minute break. After the break, review what you just studied and then add new information. Similarly, begin today’s study session with a brief review of what you studied yesterday.
5. Playing with finger paints can teach you a lot about what colors mix well. Not many kindergartners memorize “blue + yellow makes green,” yet most of them know it. Work with the information you’re trying to learn, and you will recall it much more easily than if you spent an equal amount of time simply rehearsing the information. In one psychology study subjects who organized a random list of words into categories did better at recalling the words than subjects who were specifically instructed to memorize the list.
6. To learn to read, you practice reading. Kindergartners don’t memorize lists of rules and listen to lectures on how to read. Study with the end in mind. How will you be asked for the information? Will it be an essay test, a multiple choice test, an oral exam, a live scenario? When possible, test your recall of the information using the same format with which the professor will test you or in the same manner you will use the information in real life.
7. Bean plants don’t grow very well if you forget to water them; all plants need water. Use metaphors and examples to grasp concepts. For example, if you are trying to learn how amps, resistance, and watts relate to electricity, relate the electrical concepts to the flow of water through pipes. Amperage is a measure of current, that is, the amount of electricity that flows through a given material in a given time. It’s like measuring how much water flows through a pipe in a given time. No metaphor is perfect so come up with several different metaphors for the same concept. How is each different? Where does the metaphor break down?
8. Making cookies from scratch is a good way to learn about how to follow directions. When learning, get as many senses involved as possible. Everyone learns using some combination of their senses. The average classroom lecture might involve sight and sound as the prof lectures and writes notes on the board. But when going over the classroom notes, don’t limit yourself to sight and sound. A friend of mine studying art history would sit in a different room of her house while studying paintings from different periods. Then on the test she would recall what room she was sitting in while looking at a particular painting. “Let’s see, I was sitting in the kitchen, so this painting is post-modern.” Similarly, building models of molecules makes learning the difference between hexane and benzene hard to forget. Or how about snacking on a different type of food or burning a different scented candle while learning different items. “So was Descarte a 16th or 17th century philosopher? Ummm…cinnamon candle…must be 17th.”
9. Every morning the teacher tells us what we’ll be doing that day. Set goals. Setting both short and long-term goals gives direction to your studying and lets you measure your progress. A long term goal might be something like getting accepted to Cornell Vet School by August of 2010. Scoring at least a 720 on the math section of the GRE would be a goal that might help you achieve that. Your short term goal for the day’s study session might be to do a single, thirty-minute, practice section of GRE math.
10. Being able to sing the alphabet song isn’t the same as being able to spell. Aim to understand, not simply to recall. If you understand, recall usually takes care of itself, but recall doesn’t necessarily give you understanding. For example, understanding how prevailing wind direction and mountain ranges interact to cause rainforests and deserts allows you to make predictions about climate in locations all over the globe. Memorizing the average rainfall in the Gobi Desert and in Nepal is less useful in that regard.

*Apologies to Robert Fulghum, and thank you, Mrs. Hudson.

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