Study Prof

Recently, a student asked me for my hot list of academic life-changers; key study skills you can use to dominate your grades. Here goes…

1) Get help. It’s the 21st Century, fellow netizens! Flying cars, robotic house maids, and personal jet packs are now commonplace… okay, well, maybe not. But it’s still the 21st Century!, which means you don’t have to rely on your brilliant professor’s rapid-fire mumble-lectures and micro-type PowerPoints. Use the interwebs and (more…)

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Cody Blair has spent over a decade helping students and teachers discover the secrets that make learning simple! His ebook, Secrets Smart Students Know, reveals how the best students use powerful study skills, maximize their memory, avoid procrastination, and maximize their focus to achieve fantastic grades with much less work! Click now to find out more about simple methods to maximize your study skills.

© Cody Blair, All Rights Reserved. You may reprint the above article as long as you include the above bio/resource information in full, including the functioning links. Do not make any changes to the article or bio. If you can't include clickable links, please ask permission to reprint.

Need a step-by-step formula for puttin’ the hurt on your current course load? Want to muscle through those killer classes and become a legend of learning? Here’s an idiot-proof way to step-up your academic game in three simple steps. Caution: This works best for non-skill-based classes such as, history, political science, sociology, biology, etc. rather than topics like physics, cage-fighting, foreign languages, and math.

First: Make sure you take thorough notes. You can’t master the material if you don’t remember what it was. For a more in-depth how-to on taking noteworthy notes–notes that will cause your professor to weep uncontrollably and set up a shrine to you in the staff lounge–look here. As you’re capturing those notes, be sure to get down the high-payoff items, and I mean payoff in terms of exam grades. You want only to study the info that will actually boost your GPA. Not sure if an item is going to be on the test? (more…)

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Cody Blair has spent over a decade helping students and teachers discover the secrets that make learning simple! His ebook, Secrets Smart Students Know, reveals how the best students use powerful study skills, maximize their memory, avoid procrastination, and maximize their focus to achieve fantastic grades with much less work! Click now to find out more about simple methods to maximize your study skills.

© Cody Blair, All Rights Reserved. You may reprint the above article as long as you include the above bio/resource information in full, including the functioning links. Do not make any changes to the article or bio. If you can't include clickable links, please ask permission to reprint.

~~The “100 Words (or Less)” series gives you a super-short summary of what you need to know about the subject at hand and does it in 100 words or less. Check the link at the bottom for more detailed info about the topic.~~

Superior Notes do four things.

C – They Capture the information you need AND none of the fluff.

O – They Organize the information, making it easier to see the structure and easier to understand and recall.

P – They Process the information going beyond the information to it’s implications and the questions it raises.

S - They make it easy to Study the information. Superior notes are laid out in such a manner that they can easily be used to self-quiz, without having to make flashcards, retype, etc.

See these posts on better note-taking for more  on each of these.

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Cody Blair has spent over a decade helping students and teachers discover the secrets that make learning simple! His ebook, Secrets Smart Students Know, reveals how the best students use powerful study skills, maximize their memory, avoid procrastination, and maximize their focus to achieve fantastic grades with much less work! Click now to find out more about simple methods to maximize your study skills.

© Cody Blair, All Rights Reserved. You may reprint the above article as long as you include the above bio/resource information in full, including the functioning links. Do not make any changes to the article or bio. If you can't include clickable links, please ask permission to reprint.

I recently recorded a live webinar revealing six of my most powerful (and immediately useful) study skills.  Just click the image below to watch it.  Premium Members Only! Use this link to watch the webinar. You’ll have to log in to see it.

Revised and Updated

Summarizing and Note Taking

Effective summarizing requires analysis that leads to deeper understanding. Students benefit from taking notes in both linguistic and visual forms. -Northwest Regional Educational Consortium

All of us know how to summarize and take notes, but most of us only use those skills in certain situations. Ponder these examples… (more…)

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Cody Blair has spent over a decade helping students and teachers discover the secrets that make learning simple! His ebook, Secrets Smart Students Know, reveals how the best students use powerful study skills, maximize their memory, avoid procrastination, and maximize their focus to achieve fantastic grades with much less work! Click now to find out more about simple methods to maximize your study skills.

© Cody Blair, All Rights Reserved. You may reprint the above article as long as you include the above bio/resource information in full, including the functioning links. Do not make any changes to the article or bio. If you can't include clickable links, please ask permission to reprint.

Lifehacker.com has put together a very straightforward guide to taking superior notes using the Cornell Method.

To become an excellent turnip you simply sit around and wait for someone to dump manure on you and water you from time to time. That makes for a great vegetable, but not a great student. So why do most students sit in class and wait for knowledge to be dumped on them?

To become an excellent hawk you roam far and wide with your eyes peeled for anything that looks tasty. When you see it, you dive on it, kill it, and take it home to the kids. That’s also–figuratively speaking–how to make a great scholar.

During a lecture or while reading a text, you are cruising, eyes peeled, looking for any little tasty bit of learning you can find. Once you see it, go and get it! Own it! Kick it’s hiney and eat it for dinner. Here’s how…

1. Pay rapt attention. Birds of prey are properly known as raptors, from the Latin word meaning “one who seizes by force.” As you sit in that lecture hall or hunker down with your Ramen and that three-inch thick, hernia-inducing textbook, actively look for facts and concepts.Some textbooks and professors will make it easy for you. They’ll put main points in bold letters, or point to a key concept and say, “this will be on the test.” This makes your job easy; pounce on the point.Other lecturers and books will camouflage important points in a thicket of words, unimportant drivel, and poorly-told anecdotes. Only the most attentive raptors will spy their prey and swoop down for the kill.
2. Pounce on the point. That means go grab it and make it yours by putting it in your notes using some of the note taking methods I’ve mentioned. Notes are the equivalent of talons for the raptor. The prey is not yours until you’ve got a death grip on it. If it’s in your notes, then it’s yours. You can eat it later at your leisure.
3. Rip it apart and consume it. Don’t be content to simply get the concept into your notes. You must really understand it. One great way to do that is by asking great questions and then answering them. Please log in or sign up to read the rest of this content. Find out more.

Actively go and pursue knowledge by paying careful attention, capturing concepts in your notes, and then processing the knowledge with good questions. Don’t settle for being a vegetable waiting for the next load of manure. Be a hawk! Go own that knowledge!

Don’t waste time rewriting the same long names and words in your notes. Create a key with your abbreviations for the particular set of notes your taking. I usually put this key on the first page of notes in the upper right. I might start off with several key terms that I know will crop up, but I usually add others as the class progresses.

Example:

N – Napoleon

W – Wellington

Br – British

Fr – French

Wl – Waterloo

Now, instead of (more…)

My friend, Aliya, listening intently

Don’t you hate it when you’re talking to someone on the phone and you can tell they aren’t really listening? The pauses between your questions and their answers get longer and … longer. They ask questions that you’ve already answered. You know they aren’t paying attention.

Failing to pay close attention in class makes for missed details, frustrated professors, and poor notes. Missed details? What if one of those details is on your next test? You’ll be getting a lower grade. You might even fail! Frustrated professors and teachers–in smaller classes–often notice your lack of attention, just as you notice when your friend-on-the-phone is otherwise occupied. That frustration can make your prof angry and resentful; not the attitude you want them to have when they’re grading your paper. Even in very large classes, professors notice when most people aren’t listening. Often that makes them (more…)

Ironing a nice fold into a shirt or some pants requires heat, pressure, and repetition. First you get the iron hot, then, applying steady pressure, you go over that crease again and again until the fold is pressed into the fabric.

Could you get the fold ironed in without the heat and pressure? Sure, but it would take forever.

Getting memories ironed into our brains is a similar process. Going over the memory again and again will eventually work, but we can make the process much faster and more effective by using the mental equivalent of heat and pressure–what psychologists refer to as elaboration.

Some ways you can use elaboration…

• Ask yourself questions about what you are learning. Where have I heard this before? What does it remind me of? Is this true? How will this be tested?
• Turn verbal information into visual information by drawing a picture, chart or diagram.
• Turn visual information into verbal information by describing what you see.
• Relate the information to something you already know. That Mussolini character reminds me a lot of my hockey coach. (All of these are integrated directly into my note taking system as discussed on the free study skills video and in my ebook).
• Act it out. For example, put on a play about cellular mitosis using tube socks in the starring roles. (I suggest you shut and lock your door before doing this since it tends to cause roommates to give you funny looks and hide their socks.)
• Set it to music. My daughter’s kindergarten teacher used this to great effect, teaching her students a song to help them recall the spelling of every color they learned (the downside is that my daughter now hums under her breath when asked to spell “yellow.”) I’ve had friends who used this method to memorize extremely complex processes, though, so don’t discount it.

Here’s how I use this to really learn complex texts I’m reading…Please log in or sign up to read the rest of this content. Find out more.